Ancestral Night

CHAPTER 15

I GLIDED THROUGH THE HATCHWAY, AND suddenly fell. I tucked, striking the deck with my shoulder. Rolling, I ended flat on my back, a staticky circle of haze tunneling my vision. My diaphragm cramped, bright and sharp, and I could only keep straining to exhale, long after any air had left my lungs.

I thought I would pass out, but the cramp eased after a few moments.

Well, this was fucking familiar.

“Flush it down the Well,” I swore. “I hate gravity.”

The vanishing hatch reconstituted itself in a solidifying swirl of vapor. Reverse sublimation: just a little more Koregoi magic. I was too overwhelmed—and too focused on my job and its dangers—to let myself feel overawed. I rolled on my side, still breathing shallowly because I was afraid of triggering the cramp once more.

The inside of the Koregoi ship was of a piece with the outside. The same materials, from a preliminary examination, and the same seemingly random visible light colors that gave way to detailed ultraviolet markings. Some of these were on a much finer scale, and I assumed they were probably use-instruction markings of some sort: the usual warnings and notifications and technical specifications that most sentients living amid the deferred catastrophe of space tend to print on their delicate traveling habitats because you don’t always have time to look such things up in the midst of an emergency.

The corridor I was in was sinuous and sinusoidal, roughly square but with rounded corners and slightly, varyingly convex walls. Light was provided by long, luminescent streaks embedded into the various surfaces, seemingly at random.

The corridor was about three times as big around as an access tube designed for a human would be. Those random patches of ochre and mossy colors banded it, like the segments of a Terran earthworm. It twisted in a way that made me think it ran, itself, around other spaces inside the hull of the ship, and very probably around blocks of machinery and hardware, too. Not in any kind of regular, regimented way that would seem normal to a human engineer. But probably in a manner that was very efficient for packing things into spaces, if you could control the horizontal and the vertical.

I rolled onto my hands and knees, orienting myself. It seemed as if I could stand up comfortably in the corridor or service tube or whatever it was, so I did, trying to make sense of how it twisted around at seeming random. I took a step forward, balancing on my afthands, thinking sadly of how bruised my fingers were going to be again. It was enough to make a girl start thinking of getting herself restored to baseline.

I jest.

Nothing was going to make me start thinking of getting myself restored to baseline.

I walked forward a little bit more, expecting to feel the corridor sloping under me where it twisted. Instead, what happened was that the corridor reoriented itself as if it were spinning, my inner ear insisting that I was walking on a perfectly level surface with no angle, twist, or incline at all. This did not agree with what my eyes were telling me, and as a result my stomach lurched.

Singer helped me tune down the nausea, and I leaned one hand on the wall and closed my eyes until the hull stopped spinning.

“Well, that’s a terrible design choice,” I said.

I opened my eyes again, tried a few more experimental steps. Nope, still awful.

“Make a note,” I said. “The Koregoi did not suffer vertigo.”

“Maybe you should come back,” Singer said.

“Maybe you should crawl,” suggested Connla.

“Maybe you should do something anatomically improbable,” I retorted. Maybe if I looked down at my afthands while I was moving, it would be okay. I could stop every few steps and glance around to make sure I wasn’t missing anything.

I probably wouldn’t get eaten.

Right?

Well, it did work, sort of. I didn’t get sick again, and I made forward progress, but since I didn’t know what I was looking for or where I was going, even progress was something of a Pyrrhic victory. I might be walking away from the thing I needed.

I was, however, officially in possession of the Koregoi ship for salvage purposes, which would do a lot to improve our bargaining position. And Connla’s economic situation. If he wound up on his own in the not-too-distant future, at least he wouldn’t be in a pile of debt because of fines and so forth.

And if Singer and I ever got out of Synarche service, we’d be in a good position as well.

I held on to that happy thought as I picked my way through the ship. It was ghostly, empty. Unlike the Milk Chocolate Marauder, there was the usual detritus of a shipboard life—mysterious alien artifacts that were probably chewing gum wrappers and condoms and shoelaces, or the moral equivalent. The archinformists were going to have a field dia with this place. I spotted a small enclosure with some unsettling plumbing that I was pretty sure was the head. When I investigated it, I managed to figure out how to make one of the fixtures make the sort of whooshing sound that generally indicates a vacuum disposal. Fitting my anatomy to it would be a different issue, but I didn’t intend to be sticking around that long.

The other fixture produced actual water—H₂O—that seemed clean and uncontaminated to a quick field test.

Stop for a moment and just appreciate it. Actual water. Running water. In a ship that had been parked out behind a black hole for possibly millions of ans.

That left me with more of a sense of awe than anything else I had seen that dia.

It also told me that the Koregoi (or at least, these Koregoi) probably used good old water as a solvent in their biology. Just as I did. That was important and interesting. The ship’s atmosphere told me they breathed a tolerable mix of oxygen, nitrogen, and the usual accoutrements. I would bet I could survive where they came from.

Science! But there was no sign of aliens, dead or otherwise. There was just the mysterious warmth, and what Singer assured me would be a perfectly breathable atmosphere if my suit developed a catastrophic leak. Even so I was glad we’d gotten the new ones at Downthehatch.

He utterly forbade me to crack my helmet, though, which seemed like an unkind tease. Why tell me I could breathe it and then leave me smelling my own farts?

I know, I know. Pathogens. And not the fart pathogens. The alien ones.

“I think I’m in to the system,” Singer said. “Working on sorting this data out. I’ll have to teach myself their language, but that shouldn’t be too hard. They seem to have been carrying a lot of children’s picture books, or the alien equivalent.”

“That’s depressing,” Connla said.

I asked, “How come?”

There was a pause, as if he couldn’t believe what a barbarian he was dealing with, before he said, “Because that probably means it was a colony transport, and full of young sentients. Before it mysteriously got abandoned near the event horizon of a giant black hole, with all their stuff in it.”

I peered into a cabin that had obviously been a bunkroom. Six beds, sized for two humans apiece—or probably one Koregoi, based on the corridor height. I was spending a lot of time in ships designed for larger sentients.

“Sorry,” I said. “I forget about childhood. Maybe they forgot where they parked?”

He laughed, but I could tell he was trying pretty hard to get there.

“Colony ship explains the size, though,” Singer said. “If that’s what it is there must be lots of habitat space in there somewhere.” He paused. “Colony ship, or just a colony.”

“Mobile space station?”

He made a shrugging noise. “Why not?”

“How close are the Synarche ships?”

“Another hour or so,” Singer said. “What’s around the next bend?”

“That’s the attitude that got sentients to the stars!” Adrenaline kept breaking through my tuning, and it was making me giddy.

I took a few more steps, paying attention to my afthands to fight the vertigo, and found myself in a large space whose entire ceiling glowed with a broad-spectrum light. The walls—and how weird was it to be thinking in terms of ceilings and walls on a starship?—had tiers of transparent, sharply angled receptacles projecting from them. Peering through, I could see what looked like drains, and the ports for a fluid circulation system.

“Looks like it was hydroponics, once upon a time.”

“Or a really big filing system,” Connla said.

“There’s desiccated organic material in here. I’m going with hydroponics.”

“Sure,” Connla said. “Choose the least creative interpretation.”

I ignored him. I walked through the hydroponics room and up the far wall, which became a floor as I stepped on to it. I was pretty sure that would work, because I could see the corridor continuing overhead—or dead ahead, once I’d made the transition. I wanted to find a viewport, for no particular reason except the emotional validation of looking out at space from the inside, and maybe watching the Synarche ships arrive.

The idea made me sad. But it also felt like closure. And I badly needed some of that.

The corridor forked. I took the left, on a whim, because it spiraled perspective-up while the other one bent and arced perspective-down. My afthands hurt like blazes. Back on Singer, in any normal ship, they were a huge advantage. Under these circumstances, not so much. I figured that once the Synarche got here I would just sit down and let them come get me. They could earn their keep by carrying me out.

Yes. A nice comfortable stretcher.

That sounded like just the thing.

Eventually I found the sky.

It was round and vast from where I stood beneath an enormous dome of a viewport. And it wasn’t empty at all, because it was full of the incandescent blaze of the Saga-star and the tiny, sharp-edged shadows of the flitting Core ships like paper cutouts held up on little sticks before an inferno. The Koregoi ship was filtering the brilliance just as Singer did—though probably not the same way Singer did—so I could look up at the stunningness of that vista with my heart in my mouth and just breathe it in for a little while.

It was incredibly glorious, and the ship I was on was the most amazing archeological and engineering discovery of my lifetime, and all I could feel was melancholy. Hugely, quietly, complicatedly sad.

Singer was in the foreground, a larger silhouette than the others. My home for fifteen ans.

I thought, I won’t go back there. It will be easier to say goodbye if I don’t go back.

Somebody else could pack up my things, the few things I had with sentimental value that weren’t recyclables. Did I really care about an old book and a couple of knickknacks?

I would just embark from here, onto one of the Synarche ships. Or maybe they’d want me to join the prize crew on the Koregoi ship, given what covered my body beneath the transparent top layers of my skin. Suddenly, I wanted to strip my suit off and hold my hand up to the sky, to compare the patterns the Koregoi senso had left on my body to the swirling, lensed, impossibly distorted glory of the Core.

I wouldn’t do it, though. Singer would be terribly disappointed in me if I did. And suddenly I could not bear the thought of ever disappointing Singer.

I wasn’t losing anything, I told myself. All those memories were there in my fox, crisp as the dia they were recorded, and unlike meat memories they wouldn’t decay or alter if I pulled them up and reveled in them.

I wouldn’t, though. It wasn’t healthy to live in the past—or worse, to let the past live in your head forever. I’d save that kind of wallowing for special occasions.

Anniversaries. Funerals.

You know.

And it was a lie. I was losing something: I was losing the chance to make new memories, to return to a place of safety. And no matter how philosophical I managed to pretend I was about it, that stuff was gone. I’d gotten invested in a future—despite telling myself after Niyara that I was never going to get invested in a future with anyone or anything again.

We need stability, I guess. Our brains fool us. We can put down roots, even in the hydroponic tanks of a glorified tugboat. We can’t help putting down roots. The best we can do is lie to ourselves about it. I don’t think it’s even a sophipathology, something you can correct for. If anything, not getting attached is the illness of thought that leads to antisocial behavior. It’s just the way things are. Sometimes—usually—navigating life involves navigating pain.

But it’s one thing to know that on an intellectual level, and another to face the reality of how the dream of a future had become a fading projection, like a memory of something that never happened. Had turned out to be a chimera, all along.

I wanted to go home. And home was gone, lost to me. For the third time in my life.

You would think you’d get used to that sort of thing. But all I could manage was to hope that this was the last time.

“Hey,” Singer said. His voice made me jump; it didn’t come through the senso but reverberated in my actual skull, through atmosphere and helmet and atmosphere again. “I got some control of this thing.”

He was talking through some sort of speaker or vibrating membrane, somewhere within the structure of the observation bubble surrounding me.

“How about engines?” I asked. “Life support?”

“Don’t rush me.”

“It came when I called. Are you telling me you can’t do as well as I did?”

“I don’t have aliens in my butt.”

“You don’t have a butt to have aliens in.”

“Well, we’re guaranteed salvage rights now,” Connla interrupted. He was trying to sound cheery and devil-may-care. He managed to sound strained, mostly. “Just in the nick of time, too. Here comes the Core.”

I stood and watched them come. And for all my determination not to live in the past, here I was. Poking around the ragged edges of Niyara, and losing Niyara, and missing Niyara, which was the most terrible thing. Because she didn’t deserve my grief, or my sorrow. She didn’t even deserve my anger, and yet here I was, struggling with letting that anger go.

Neither did my clade, come to think of it. And yet, there was some pain there too. Funny and distanced, just like the pain around Niyara was weirdly attenuated. Not just by time, but because I was a different person than I had been then—Judicial interventions, and therapy, and getting myself taken out of the clade consensus. All of it had left a mark.

This would leave a mark, too, but I thought about it, and I decided that I didn’t want to get over it by turning myself into a different person this time.

I liked who I was now. It wasn’t entirely comfortable—I knew there were places where I chafed and rubbed and prickled, against my shipmates and against myself—but overall, I liked who I’d been with Singer and Connla.

And time and experience were starting to paper over the holes in my memory around Niyara and around leaving the clade, the things I hadn’t been permitted to remember because they were clade secrets, or secrets about how terrorists could manage to blow up half a recreation deck.

I didn’t want to reinvent myself again. Even if hanging on to myself hurt.

Was this what having an identity felt like? Was this being someone? Feeling like there was a core of who you were beyond which you could not be altered?

Feeling… continuity. Feeling like you existed as a real, solid thing, apart from your trauma.

Did other people have this? And not just a set of rules and chemical settings, tunings and rightminding, that they’d decided bounded the parameters of their actions?

It explained some things about people’s behavior. And their defensiveness surrounding certain antisocial aspects of their personalities.

I had never really felt like I existed apart from the clade, and apart from Niyara. The person I was now was Judicially constructed. Who was I really?

“Haimey?” Singer said. “Are you all right?”

“Sad,” I admitted.

“I can sense that. Should you bump?”

“No!” I made myself jump with my own vehemence. “Sorry. I mean, no, it’s natural sadness. Earned. I’m going to miss being a team with Connla and you. And I’m going to miss the cats.”

“It might not be permanent,” Singer said.

“I know. But I can’t hold on to that.”

That was the future. And the future was gone.

“I know.” A pause; then he said, “I’m putting together the beginnings of a schematic, if you want to explore a little bit more.”

“Nah,” I said. “My afthands hurt. I think I’m just going to lie down here and watch the Synarche come.”

I made myself comfortable on the decking and propped my ankles on a little bump in the floor. The gravity shifted directions there, so it felt like my lower extremities were floating, which helped with the pain relief. It was awfully weird, experiencing space as up, and anyway craning against gravity was doing a number on my neck by then.

The little ships grew until they were as big as Singer, then bigger. They were still farther away than he was, which gave me a pretty good indication of their size. We’d offered no indication of lack of cooperation, but they weren’t taking any chances that we might hit a bout of independence or antisocialism or just plain sophipathology and light out for the territories in the archaeological discovery of the century. And to be honest, if we’d had a better idea of how to make it go, I might have done just that.

Also, I bet most of them wanted to be in on the adventure. Every syster within striking distance would want a taste of and a claim on this discovery. And even putting materialistic and status motives aside, how would you ever live it down with your great-great-grand-nestlings if you passed up the opportunity to be present at a piece of history like this?

“How many of them are there?” I asked Singer.

“Twenty-three,” he answered.

“Wow,” Connla said. “I can’t remember the last time I felt this important.”

“Oh,” I said. “I bet you had a line around the block to ask you to dance at your graduation ball.”

He snorted. “I’m not that much younger than you, old lady.”

Actually, he was a few ans older. But I let it slide.

I thought about my breathing, and found a kind of peace. Melancholy but not miserable. I’d probably cry myself to sleep for ages, and every time I saw a cat, if I didn’t tune, but I could survive this.

I would survive this. I would stay friends with Connla and Singer, because there was no reason not to.

And I would go on to have new adventures, besides.

The Synarche ships were coasting to a matched velocity, and I was feeling… not exactly good about the galaxy, but at least not catastrophic. Singer’s tug turned, moving back to allow them in toward the Koregoi vessel…

…and exploded into a thousand flaring firework sparks.