Ancestral Night

CHAPTER 22

AS FOR ME? I SURVIVED.

Because I was in custody, I survived.

I was the one who lived.

My machine memories were edited. Because meat memories tend to be subsumed to outside narratives, the basic result was that my entire memory of events was… repaired. Replaced with memories that suited a past I was deemed able to live with, as part of my rehabilitation process. I hadn’t ever been supposed to find out what happened to my clade, but it came out at the trial, so out of kindness Justice took it away again.

I consented.

Wouldn’t you?

I was given the opportunity to have input into constructing a personality that the court deemed socially acceptable. Then I received intensive rightminding and became the new, improved Haimey Dz.

I had built myself from a kit. With some extensive professional assistance, naturally.

It was better to think my clade had cut me off after I left them than to remember what they had actually done. I wish I still had no idea what had happened to my crèche-sisters. The fact that I hadn’t realized that I didn’t know what had become of them until I was trapped in a runaway alien starship headed far up and out from the Milky Way—that I had, in fact, more or less forgotten all about them, categorizing them with the rest of the clademothers and other relations I thought I’d left behind or who had frozen me out—was a fresh and scouring little grief right up inside me, like a bubble behind my ribs.

I’d been a dupe, all right, but I hadn’t been Niyara’s dupe. She’d actually done something to protect me. Something she didn’t have to do.

Something that indicated that she knew what was going on, what my clade had done, and that she actually cared about me. And for almost two decans, I’d been blaming her for everything. When my own family had been the ones to dupe me. To sacrifice me. And to make me think it was my own idea.

And then to leave me holding the bag, and the whole moral weight of everything they’d done.

Who was it who said the truth would set you free?

Freedom tasted a lot like choked-back vomit.

You never want to puke in microgravity if you can help it, and so I hung on to my bile, though it was a narrow triumph and a dubious one.

When I, itchy-eyed and somewhat the worse for exhaustion, came back into our impromptu habitation chamber, Farweather was awake and alert. She was doing calisthenics to the rattling of her chain, and she looked calm and cheerful and well rested. I wanted to kick her in the chin, but instead I emptied her slops, then went over to the mess kit and knocked together coffee and two bowls of porridge. Farweather was watching me, bird-bright. I neither looked at her nor spoke until the food was done, and she didn’t say anything either.

I brought her a bulb of coffee and a bowl of porridge (algae and creamed grain… delightful) before stepping back to the pad-couch opposite to eat my own breakfast.

I didn’t have much appetite. Hers seemed to be fine.

I said, “You wanted me to remember that I made the bombs.”

“I did,” she said.

“It’s my fault all those people died.”

“Pretty much,” Zanya said. “Are you going to stop condescending to me now?”

I still didn’t look at her. I drank my coffee. The porridge wouldn’t go down on its own. I mean, it was a struggle on my best dia. Todia, it was actively nauseating. Or maybe I just didn’t feel like eating.

“Look,” Zanya said, “I do feel like I know you, a little.”

I snorted. “We’ve been sleeping on the same deck plates for decians now.”

“I told you I had an ayatana from Niyara.” She stretched, both hands above her head, lifting one shoulder and then the other. I heard her spine crack. Gravity.

“I told you I didn’t believe you. Twice, I think.”

She smiled at me. “Fact doesn’t care if you believe in it.”

“And you’ve reviewed this putative recording.”

“I have.” The corners of her mouth curved down as she lost the smile. “She was one of ours, you know.”

“I figured that out eventually.” The possibility that she wasn’t lying left me agitated, edgy.

She sipped her coffee, savoring. “She cared about you.”

“I figured that out eventually, too.” I pushed my porridge at her, unable to waste resources no matter how badly I wanted her to go to hell. She took it with a look of surprise, but set the bowl inside her empty one and went to work polishing off the remains. She was as hungry as I ought to be.

Farweather finished the greenish, unappealing gruel and stifled a burp behind her hand, looking momentarily uncomfortable. Neither one of us was used to getting enough food anymore.

She set the bowls aside and picked the coffee back up. “Was this an apology?”

“Do I have something to apologize for?”

Echoes of a petulant, inadequately rightminded adolescent.

“It seems like you think you do.” She crossed her long legs and leaned back.

“What do you mean?”

“You were blaming yourself for what happened on Ansara before you even knew the truth,” she pointed out, conveniently forgetting—or erasing—that she’d been blaming me herself a very few minutes before. “You keep trying to… I don’t know, redeem yourself through service. You need to let go of that desire, Dz. Stop trying to make amends for things that are not and never were your fault.”

“I built a bomb.”

“Four bombs.” She grinned. “Actually. But that wasn’t you. Not exactly. That was somebody Nyumba Yangu Haina Mlango made up out of whole cloth, right? Somebody exactly like the rest of them.”

I settled back and stared at her, realizing that I had crossed my arms defensively but not having much in the way of will to uncross them.

She said, “There’s a weird power dynamic at work in here, too, right? If you, Dz, have to make amends for things even if you couldn’t control them at the time, then in some way you, Dz, get to feel that you’re not powerless. If you have to make amends for things that happened against your will, then you reclaim some power over those events.”

I didn’t answer.

“Look,” she said. “My people aren’t real comfortable with modifying yourself into a new species, but I have to admit that your people are reactionary even by my standards. A bunch of retro-gendered radically cis-female separatists who brainwash their unmodified, baseline-DNA clone children into absolute obedience and oneness with some primitive group mind? That’s a little fucking perverted.”

“You’re saying my guilt is inappropriate.”

“I’m saying I’m glad you got out. Got some freedom. You didn’t have that freedom when you were with Niyara, even though you thought you did. You didn’t have that freedom when Justice’s legacy juice was running your head.”

“So I’m free now.” I kicked an afthand. “You set me free; that’s what you’re saying.”

“I’m saying that you didn’t make the choices, so your assuming responsibility for the outcomes is a little unrealistic, don’t you think? Even if it is a means of asserting some agency over the course of proceedings.”

“Somebody’s responsible. And I’m the only person likely to step up to it, so I guess it is my job, yes.”

“I’m absolving you,” she said.

“I’d be more inclined to accept that if it didn’t come from a mass murderer.”

If I’d expected her to flinch, I was disappointed. She inclined her head, and the smile flickered back for a moment before vanishing again. Touché.

It takes one to know one, babes.

“Besides,” I said. “The only absolution is in balancing the action. Exactly as if it were a debt from a past life.”

“Do you believe in past lives?”

“I believe in past selves,” I said. “I sort of have to.”

“And you think you can carry the debt of what a dead woman did?”

“Is that what you’d call my past? A life lived by a dead woman?”

She made an eloquent, lazy gesture with her neck and shoulders. She changed the subject. “So your little Utopia—”

“Not so little.”

“—what do you do about people who exploit the system?”

“You mean, people like you?”

She ignored my attempt to needle her. I suppose, given her life in a primitive society and her own ability to needle me, she had some practice. “Malingerers. People who don’t pull their weight. How do you drive them to work harder?”

“Why do they need to?”

She blinked at me. I thought she was honestly puzzled. She shook her head and said, “But if they don’t work—”

I said, “Busywork, they used to call it. There’s absolutely no value to it. Economic value, or personal. There’s value in work you enjoy, or that serves a need. There’s no value in work for its own sake. It’s just… churn. Anxiety. Doing stuff to be doing stuff, not because it needs doing. There’s enough for everybody.”

I could see her getting angry, and honestly I didn’t actually care if she understood what I was trying to say. I suspected it would take a full course of rightminding and ans of talk therapy to make a dent in Farweather and her ossified, archaic belief patterns. And I was bored with arguing with her.

My turn to change the subject. “Do you want some more coffee?”

“I’d be a fool to say no.”

I made the coffee. She didn’t speak. Her chain rattled lightly; when I turned around she’d wiped the bowls out with a sanitizer and stacked them neatly. The bowls had come with the ship, and as far as I knew they were hats or shoes or alien commodes, but they did okay in holding porridge. The coffee I brewed in bulbs, because that was the way it came prepackaged. All you had to do was obtain or create boiling water, and then inject it. The bulb would expand, stretching from the size of a thumb joint to large enough to hold a good-sized portion. The filter was built right in.

The power flickered again while I was boiling the water—but since all I was doing was boiling water, and I was using Farweather’s power-cell operated probe to do it, that didn’t really affect anything. I would go looking for the problem again todia, I decided. None of my previous attempts had borne fruit, but persistence was a virtue, and it wasn’t like I had a whole lot of other things to be getting on with.

I handed Farweather her second bulb.

“I’m going to vibrate this chain right off me. And wind up in caffeine withdrawal again when you cut me off.”

It was a joke. I didn’t laugh. She was trying to mend fences, though. So that was something.

She cupped the bulb in both hands, enjoying the warmth while she waited for it to cool enough to be drinkable. She looked down at it and turned it gently in her hands.

She said, “ ‘Human life. Duration: momentary. Nature: changeable. Perception: dim. Condition of body: decaying. Soul: spinning around. Fortune: unpredictable. Lasting fame: uncertain. Sum up: The body and its parts are a river, the soul a dream and mist, life is warfare and a journey far from home, lasting reputation is oblivion.’ ”

“That’s grim,” I said.

“That’s Marcus Aurelius,” she answered.

I drank my coffee. It was too hot, but I managed not to scorch a blister on my palate. This time.

“So given that,” she said, “why don’t you be somebody you want to be, instead of somebody you think you need to be in order to make reparations? Why not pick your own purpose in life?”

“You said it yourself,” I told her. “That wasn’t me. I don’t exist.”

She blinked at me with her head cocked as if what I was saying was in an untranslatable language.

I said, “I never existed. There was the me the clade made, and the me Justice made. There’s no real me in here at all. So I can’t want anything. And I can’t have any purpose in life, other than to make amends.”

She shook her head. I decided I didn’t want to hear whatever was about to come out of her opening mouth, because it would all be lies and self-contradiction anyway. So I got up and I stalked off, and when she croaked, half laughing, “But that doesn’t make any sense at all!” I pretended I hadn’t heard her and kept walking.

I went up to the observation deck, and tried to talk to the ship again. Sometimes, I thought I might be getting somewhere.

Sometimes there was almost a sense, a flicker of some awareness at the edge of my own. Like, maybe the Prize was out there, but I just didn’t know how to reach it.

“It can’t be too hard if Farweather pulled it off,” I said bitterly to thin air.

But that presence, or that awareness, felt familiar rather than alien. So I wondered if I wasn’t just experiencing the sort of sensory fill-in that your brain provides in total darkness. Hang out where there’s absolutely no light for long enough, and your memory will start painting pictures out of the random firing of your visual cortex neurons while they try to make sense of a blackness they were not designed for.

So if I felt something out there, I guessed there was a pretty good chance that I was imagining it.

I tried for more than a stanhour and got nowhere. Again.

Of course, I came back eventually. To be honest, I came back sooner than I really wanted to. And not just because while it was a big ship, there wasn’t much to do on it beyond exploring, going through cabinets for neatly stowed gear with more or less mysterious purposes, and being painfully aware of how Synarche archinformists would be pitching a fit at me for contaminating their site with my presence and microbes and skin cells and air currents and relentless rearranging of stuff. But unless I actually managed to trace the fault in the power system—assuming there was a fault, and flickering occasionally wasn’t something that the Koregoi considered a design feature (who knew? maybe it was their idea of wall art?)—I didn’t have anything to fix, or fix on. I was just… kind of hoping I would come up with a way of getting the ship away from Farweather by understanding it better.

Which, admittedly, was not such a bad idea.

Still, if I was floating through maintenance tubes I wasn’t talking to Farweather, and if I wasn’t talking to Farweather I stood half a chance of getting my head on straight eventually and even keeping it that way. Rightminding or no rightminding.

Okay, straighter.

I knew that my worrying about archinformists was a kind of denial. Because it had at its base the assumption that I would beat the odds and somehow manage to pry the ship out of Farweather’s control and fly it back to Synarche space. The conquering hero.

Which seemed… okay. Possibly like something I shouldn’t count on being able to pull off. But it was a nice life goal for the time being. And if I wound up kidnapped by space pirates… well, I wouldn’t be the first woman to have been.

Who knew? Maybe I could even thrive as a space pirate, if I played my cards right. I could reinvent myself again. Invent an entirely new identity. Again.

What did I have to take me back to the Synarche, anyway, now that Singer and Connla and the cats were gone?

Except I still thought the Synarche was right, and I still thought the Synarche was home. My affections were not alienated on that front. So I guessed whatever Farweather thought she was doing when she fried my fox, it wasn’t really working. Because what I wanted more than anything was to do the right thing.

I wished I had Singer with me to tell me what the right thing was. But I could make some guesses as to what he’d say. I’d known him pretty well. The right thing was to figure out how to get control of the Prize away from Farweather, turn it around, and begin the very, very, very long trip home. Fortunately, there was an entire inhabited galaxy between me and the Core, and the Prize was fast. But I would still be on short rations until I could find someplace to resupply.

So much algae.

Assuming she did not literally blow up, and take me and the Prize with her.

Well, if I had to toss her out an airlock to save the ship and myself…

…I’d span that void when I came to it. Especially since I had in fact been trying to wrest control of the ship and it just had not been working.

I wondered if she knew what kind of a time limit she was operating under. And if she did know how long she had, I also wondered if there was some way to leverage relativistic effects to keep her alive long enough to get her to a surgeon who might be able to remove the bomb (if there was a bomb).

The woman had blown up my head. Why was I even still considering what might be good for her?

At least in my avoidance I was learning a lot about the ship’s systems. In particular, I was learning a great deal about its electrical grid, which was less like a grid, frankly, and more like a circulatory system. Not in the sense of being alive, per se, but in having trunks that diverged and spread apart in a branching fashion—treelike, fractal—until they cycled and returned.

I’d managed to figure out how to get into the engine room, or what I thought of as main engineering, and I supposed if I really needed to I could just sabotage something. But the random power fluctuations were already scary enough. The Enemy was out there, vast and cold and full of not much at all except the occasional random particle, and we were sweeping those up into our white field as we went.

The engines were definitely alien, but they also made sense, and I was an engineer. And these were not my first set of alien engines, either, though they were the first ones I couldn’t just pull up a manual for, even if that manual was in badly translated Novoruss.

So, I couldn’t control the ship. Not yet anyway. But I could break it. And probably kill myself and Farweather in the process—slowly, through starvation or environmental failure after we were stranded. But if we were lucky, death might come quickly and kindly. Oxygen starvation wasn’t a bad way to go. You just got sleepy and foggy, and eventually sat down for a nice nap that lasted longer than you anticipated.

Restful.

I didn’t want to nap without end. I wanted to find out what happened, going forward. I wanted to keep finding out for as long as I could. Maybe it was selfish, and maybe I didn’t deserve it, but I wanted it. I wanted to keep existing. There were future selves that I could envision, and in envisioning, want to become.

That surprised me, a little, everything considered: my culpability in what had happened on Ansara; my recent bereavement.

If giving that up was what it took to keep the Koregoi ship from falling into the hands of the pirates, though? If I had to destroy the ship to save it, I decided… I would.

I was living with enough guilt already. Becoming somebody like Farweather would mean that I had died. Died and been reinvented as somebody I did not recognize, and somebody I did not want to be.

So I had a plan, and though I didn’t really want to face Farweather, my options were somewhat limited overall. I was going to have to feed her eventually, and myself also. And since I’d given her most of my breakfast, my own hunger situation was progressing beyond where the yeast tablets could manage it for me.

I was thinking about maybe spending another stanhour tracing power lines and checking their connections, though I didn’t think it would help much. Everything seemed to be orderly and in perfect working order. There was no reason for the power drops. And the power drops didn’t seem to affect the drive, which made me think that maybe the drive was the source of the problem. If it was for some reason drawing power erratically, that might explain the dips, though I had no idea what could be causing that except a drive problem, and there was a terrifying idea. Or maybe it was the gravity generators, if that was a thing, because sure, why wouldn’t there be gravity generators making the artificial gravity in this millennians-old Koregoi starship I was stuck on, on a one-way trip to nowhere… .

Was the ship somehow using dark gravity for that? As the Ativahika did for travel?

You’re getting hysterical, Dz.

Man, times like these, I missed my regulator.

Anyway, I’d just made up my mind that I was going to head back in a stanhour or so, when the power dipped again, longer and harder this time. I grabbed a nearby housing and held on for dear life, half expecting the gravity to flicker off or the ship to abruptly change course or v and the inertial dampers that kept us all from dying to snap off and leave me slamming from deck plate to bulkhead.

Maybe I was getting a little paranoid. Maybe just a little.

In the darkness, I could have convinced myself that I felt a chill. I was being ridiculous, and I knew it. A body as large and well insulated as the Prize would take a long time to radiate its internal warmth away to a point that the inhabitants would find uncomfortable. Space is a terrible conductor of things like heat; there’s not a lot of there there for the energy to move through. So the heat has to escape in the old-fashioned way, straight radiation, and that’s inefficient and slow.

The lights stayed dim a long time, though. Long enough that I clipped my tools and gauges and headed through the various undoors as I went. I had another bad moment—it was a dia for bad moments—wondering what I would do if the hatches failed to operate, but either they had their own power sources (smart), or they had priority when it came to main power (less smart), or the little nanite fogs that I figured were probably what made them up were self-willed and self-powered and basically did their own thing, which was rejoice in sealing and unsealing hatchways anytime somebody wanted to walk through them.

I wasn’t taking any chances that it would continue working, though. I gritted my teeth against the anticipated ache in my afthands, eschewed the more comfortable but smaller and circuitous maintenance tunnels, and I ran.

When I burst back into our nest, Farweather was on her feet, turning and looking from side to side. She couldn’t really see anything, because she’d been in a room without any portholes, and I hadn’t bothered to move her. I’d just grown that permanent appurtenance from the bulkhead (sweet-talking those same utility fogs, maybe? man, I wish I knew) and unceremoniously chained her to the wall.

As soon as I bolted in and stopped short, I knew she wasn’t behind the ship’s misbehavior. Her frosty exterior was melting, her face lightly sheened with sweat. Her pulse raced in the shadow of the hollow of her jaw, and she was so razor-sharp with decians of short rations that I could see it there. I knew what her heart felt like, thundering in her chest, because mine was palpitating too.

She whirled on me. “What did you do?” she said, her voice breaking between a whine and a snarl.

“Nothing,” I said as the ship shuddered around us. My legs almost buckled as I came off the floor and then slammed back down. I didn’t go to my hands and knees, but that was as much luck as balance, and it had nothing to do with having been prepared. “It’s—happening on its own!”

She glared for a second, then decided to believe me. “Get the mattress.”

Not the one she was standing on, obviously. I snagged my own seating pad from across the cabin and humped it up on my back like a spongy, crackling turtle’s shell. For a second, I thought of ditching my utility belt—but loose tools ricocheting around the cabin would be worse than lumpy, bruising objects that were nevertheless firmly attached to my body and could not, therefore, build up enough v to be truly dangerous unless I was ricocheting around with them, in which case I would have bigger problems.

I hopped over to Farweather, the pads and packing material trailing behind me like a train. She grabbed me and dropped. I thought about banging her one in the solar plexus, but she didn’t bite or punch, so I went with her. We pressed ourselves together. I grabbed her pad and she grabbed mine, and she rolled so the packing material wound around us in a protective cocoon.

A protective shroud, the unhelpful part of my brain said.

“Choke up on my chain,” she said as the gravity cut out again and we went briefly into the air, thumping a bulkhead before we slammed again into the deck. “I’ve got the padding.”

I wished I had time to tie it in place.

Wait.

“Roll,” I said, and showed her. She helped, thrashing against me, thrusting with her shoulders and hips. She was so thin, and I was so thin, that her hip bones ground against mine. We wound the chain around our layers of padding. It was long enough to go two and a half times—and it did a good job of pinning them in place and limited our collective range of motion. I managed to work a wrench clipped to a carabiner off my belt despite the confined space and used it to secure two links of the chain to each other, effectively pinning the padding to our bodies and the cocoon of the two of us to the corner between deck and bulkhead.

Then we… lay there. And stared at each other. And waited for the next fluctuation, with no control over whether it would slam us into a deck or smash us against a bulkhead.

Nothing happened.

I watched sweat gather along the edge of her eye socket. Her breathing slowed; echoing mine, I realized, as I was regulating mine more out of habit than intent. I turned my head, because she was breathing on my face.

She ground her hips unsubtly against me, and I elbowed her in the ribs. “That’s assault.”

“Ow,” she said. “And what’s that?”

“Self-defense,” I answered. “Is it over? Do you think we should—”

We slammed sideways. Farweather cried out. I couldn’t answer, because the stanchion I’d sweet-talked the ship into growing—the one we were both now chained to—had slammed me in the ribs. The breath came out of me hard and sharp, and it wouldn’t go back in. She grabbed on to me, arms around me, and I wheezed against her shoulder and into the crook of her neck.

She smelled so good.

You’re not supposed to think of things like that when your life might be ending. On the other hand, that’s often when your body really, really wants to think about them.

We hit the deck. And then the wall, and then the deck again. We lay there gasping, clutching each other. She was on the bottom; then we bounced again and hit the end of the chain and we were side by side. Pain spiked through my elbow when she landed on it.

Her breath was hot against my throat. Breasts soft, hips sharp and painful. A pliers dug into my floating ribs. There wasn’t anything I could do to move it.

The lights shone through our translucent padding, and I looked into her transparent dark brown eyes, to the satin sheen and the patterns of veins and pigment at the back of them.

“This is a hell of a long way to go for a date,” she said, between breaths that sounded painful.

“Shut up,” I explained.

She kissed me, and I…

I let it happen.

And then I kissed her back.

Don’t get me wrong. I knew it was a terrible idea, even while it was happening. But I wanted it, and I wanted her, and I was terrified and she was there and—

Sometimes you do something that you’re not supposed to.

It was a very ill-advised kiss.

It happened anyway. And you know? I liked it.

And then we hit the stanchion again, right where the chain crossed our bodies, and snapped away from it one more time, and I—

—blacked out.

I woke up again pretty quickly once the gs were gone. Or returned to normal, I should say, because we weren’t floating, just lying on the deck in an uncomfortable bundle. The air around us was stale and smelled of sweat and a little urine. Farweather was staring at me speculatively—and a little bruisedly—from centimeters away, and everything around us seemed cool and peaceful.

“Is it safe?” I asked her.

“Is anything?”

Farweather managed to extricate one hand and struggled with the carabiner until it came loose. We rolled, unwinding the chain, and made little grunting sounds of unhappiness whenever weight or something unforgiving landed on a bruise. There were a lot of bruises. There was a lot of grunting. I figured I had at least two cracked ribs. Come on, Koregoi buggies, fix me up.

You know, it hadn’t occurred to me before just that minute that Farweather’s EM pulse had not disrupted the parasite, that I could tell. I hadn’t even thought about it. I guess I really was integrating those senses.

Neuroplasticity. It’s a hell of a thing.

Finally we unwound ourselves and got a little space between us. Superstitiously, neither one of us crawled out of our packing material yet. And neither one of us stood up, either.

Well, I say it was superstition. Maybe it was sense.

We lay there, side by side. I was panting and aching. I was only paying enough attention to Farweather to make sure she didn’t intend to brain me with that wrench.

The ship shuddered again, but the gravity remained intact this time. And now that I wasn’t distracted by being slammed against internal structures, I realized something.

Through the Koregoi senso, I could tell that we were… slowing. Gradually. Not falling out of white space all at once as the bubble collapsed, but instead… unfolding. The Koregoi ship’s drive was gradually smoothing the space around us, doing something impossible—allowing us to change vector and apparent velocity while in white space.

And through the Koregoi senso, I could also feel that there was another ship.

Another ship, in white space. Coming up on us fast, then—incredibly—matching pace with us. Falling into formation, which was something that I had heard military vessels could do, but I had never actually witnessed happening. Even in all of Connla’s fancy flying, merging bubbles and coaxing abandoned vessels out of folded space-time, I’d never seen anything like this.

Pirates.

“We’ve got company,” Farweather said unhappily, because of course she could feel everything that I could.

I looked at her in surprise. “Not yours?”

“That wasn’t the plan,” she said. “But I’ve been out of contact. Maybe the plan has changed.”

“Maybe they were following, and when the ship started acting weird they moved in?”

She gave me a sly look. If she gathered that it was a test, and I was fishing for knowledge of the Freeporters’ technological abilities, she didn’t let on.

She just shrugged. “I guess we’re going to find out.”