Ancestral Night

CHAPTER 25

BIT BY BIT. FRACTION BY fraction. The healing happens and the world moves on. Peace is not too far away; just gotta get out of this well to get there, and I bet I can get back to it if I’m diligent.

The terrain isn’t easy.

But that’s okay.

Ask me about the irony of spending so much time working feverishly to assert my independence of mind only to discover that I never had a mind of my own. On second thought, don’t ask me.

We’d been hunting Farweather for the better part of a week, and were halfway to our destination. I’d asked Singer how he dealt with there being sections of his hull—his body, essentially—that he could not access. I’d like to say that I didn’t do it while digging my fingernails into my wrist, as if the abomination of a symbiote itched—which it didn’t—and trying to take comfort in my promise to the Ativahikas to seek justice for them.

He’d clucked at me and said, “The same way anyone with unrepaired neural damage does.”

The conversation left me feeling odd and embarrassed, and I withdrew.

I was totally unprepared when Farweather contacted me again.

I heard her voice in my head abruptly, while I was picking grease out from under my fingernails. I’d been in the middle of a sentence to Singer, and I just stopped.

She didn’t offer any pleasantries, just spoke, confident that I was receiving. My mind was racing—how had she managed to reach me despite her crippled Freeport senso? And then I remembered the work I’d done to tune us to each other, back before she’d blown up my head. It was a fuzzy memory, as if it were much older and farther away than a few decians. But it was there.

“You saved my life,” Farweather said. “Why did you do that?”

I reined myself in, controlling my first few responses. The best I could manage, even as an edited reply, was, “The weakness of my civilized stomach, probably.”

“It was… brave. You risked yourself for me. The Ativahikas might have destroyed us both. I won’t forget that.”

Empty words, of course. She’d forget it the instant it was convenient, or I was in the way.

“Well, don’t spread it around,” I told her. “I’ve already got a bad-enough reputation.”

“I haven’t blown up. So you’re still on the course I set.”

“Sure looks like it,” I said. I wasn’t giving her anything. I could feel her back there, lurking over my shoulder like a looming haunt. It didn’t feel like a normal senso connection, but then I was (virtually) racing around inside my head shutting down or throttling back anything that might give her any information on my whereabouts or what I was doing, and I hadn’t willingly accepted the link in the first place.

Not that she was great at accepting healthy boundaries on her best dia.

Once I was reasonably confident that my regulation senso was probably still secure for letting Singer know what was going on, I contacted him. His firewalls were good enough that I didn’t think somebody like Farweather stood a chance of using my uplink to backdoor him: that would have taken another AI. I didn’t try to hold a conversation with him, because I figured there might be bleed-through that could alert Farweather that I was ratting on her. I just patched Singer in, confident that the act itself would alert him, and that he’d realize that I wanted him to try to track her.

“On it,” I heard him say.

I turned my attention back to Farweather, total elapsed time under a second.

“Look,” I said. “I don’t actually want to talk to you. So maybe you could just cut to whatever emotional blackmail you have planned and we can both get back to our business.”

“Harsh,” she said.

“Unless you want to turn yourself in,” I suggested. “In that case, I can introduce you to the Goodlaw, and quite a few constables.”

Intentionally, I did not tell her how many constables there were. She might know already, of course. But I had grown morally opposed to letting her have any information at all.

“You’re very charming,” Farweather said.

I said, “You mean irritating, and I learned it from you. Look, Farweather. Maybe you could just tell me what the goal is, here? Because I feel like you’re wasting my time.”

“I’m not having any luck,” Singer said. “Your Koregoi senso isn’t helping me locate her, and she’s still got me blocked from about a tenth of the ship.”

“What I want,” Farweather said, “is to be allies.”

I actually laughed out loud. Connla gave me a funny look, and I held up my hand to indicate that I was busy and would explain later.

“That’s nice,” I told her. “Possibly you should have thought of that before you blew up my head.”

“I was doing you a favor!”

My fingers itched as if the urge to punch her were an allergic reaction. “Favors,” I said, using all my self-control to stay level and to present the illusion of calm, “are generally things people ask you for, or that you ask them if they might like.”

“But if I’d asked, would you have let me?”

“That’s exactly the nature of consent,” I said. “Consent means you might not get what you want.”

“But I need your help!” she said. “And you need mine. And if we work together we have a better chance of coming out ahead.”

I could feel her bewilderment through our connection as she forgot to guard herself for a moment, or perhaps the emotion was just that strong. She literally could not understand what it was that I was upset about, or why I would hold her accountable, and she seemed incapable of understanding why her self-interest was not a compelling reason for me.

“Don’t you want that?” she asked, when I was silent for a little while.

“What does coming out ahead mean to you?”

I could almost taste her confusion. “I don’t understand what you mean.”

The sad thing was, I believed her. She had no sense of other people’s motives as separate from her own. But I knew what I meant, and at this point I was pretty sure I could come up with an analysis of her motivations more detailed and sensible than she could.

“I think you mean gaining advantage and power,” I said.

“Okay,” she agreed. “But that’s what everybody wants.”

I said, “I want to help people.”

She scoffed, as I’d known she would. “There’s no one here to impress with that kind of performance. I don’t respect those kind of games.”

“I know,” I said. “And I don’t care.”

I may have been raised in a clade, and reconstructed by Judicial. And those things might leave anybody with a distrust of rightminding. But the fact of the matter was, if ever there was somebody who was an argument for it, that argument was Zanya Farweather.

In lights.

I couldn’t say she didn’t tempt me. Of course she did. But I wouldn’t like myself afterward. And for somebody who was built from a couple of different kits by different amateur modelers and not painted very well to match, well. I was determined that whatever I was from here on out, I was going to be proud of it.

“I don’t want what you want,” I said. “And I’m not going to help you. I don’t even want to argue with you, because while I know that human beings are capable of assimilating, adopting, internalizing, integrating, and identifying with new sets of ideas—because we have, multiple times in the history of the species—I’ve discovered that I don’t actually care what you think, because you are an awful person and you want awful things.”

I barely restrained myself from adding a so there! to the end of it. I knew I sounded about thirteen, and I honestly didn’t care, because I abruptly had the courage of my convictions.

I don’t know if she heard me, because there was no response. Which was just as well.

I rolled my eyes and sighed at Connla.

“What?” he said.

“Farweather just contacted me.”

“And?

“And. Singer is right. She’s still an asshole.”

Three diar later, we arrived.

We dropped out of white space well clear of the destination, in order to get a visual read on our surroundings before approaching. The destination had been growing vaster and heavier in my awareness for the whole time. Normally, something the size of a star would not have had so much presence, but there wasn’t much out here to compete with it—and it was the size of a very large star.

I knew from our prior observations that the object was dark, or occluded. But now that we were so close, I expected to see something when we gathered on the observation deck. The light of the Milky Way was off our stern, and before us there was… nothing.

Except not nothing, because I could sense it down there, in all its mass. We could also make out the curve of lensed light arcing to embrace one side of the object, the distorted image of some distant galaxy. But what, exactly, was it curving around?

We stared, Connla and Cheeirilaq and the various constables, with our eyes. And Singer without eyes—and with every one of the ship’s sensors that he could bring to bear—but also through our eyes as well. We stared, but at first all we saw was the darkness.

Abeam at an angle, the galaxy that held our home was a misty, crystalline arc of light, a road paved in stars, calling us back. I realized I was staring at the wrong thing and forced myself to look at the enigma instead, trying to feel scientific excitement instead of nostalgia.

“Is it a black hole?” I asked.

“It’s massive enough to make one,” Singer said, “but too large… . Actually, let me enhance the view. I think I am resolving something.”

He projected it for us, and we gaped in wonder at the enhanced images. There was… a pale, moving shimmer, first. Galaxyshine, that blue-white iridescence, on a curved surface that looked, in the faint reflection of massed starlight, like overlapping scales or layers of panels or cells. Next I saw a series of narrow, faint, dully red lines, hair-fine, a network that appeared and disappeared, moved and fractured, broke apart and vanished again.

“That’s huge,” Connla said. “What in the Well is it?”

“That,” Singer answered, “is a fascinating question. And one without an immediately clear answer. It’s engineered, whatever it is. I’m reasonably confident.”

Cheeirilaq’s antennae quested. I cannot think of a known natural phenomenon that would manifest so.

“That’s comforting,” I said. “I was afraid it might be alive.”

I knew it was impolitic as it left my mouth, and I didn’t need to hear Singer’s mild tone to realize it. “Are the two necessarily exclusive?”

He let me bask in being ashamed for a moment, then said, “Shall I bring us a little closer?”

“Do you think it’s noticed us?” Connla walked up to the windows—slow, low-gravity bounces—and leaned forward as if those few centimeters of distance would help him see more clearly. In the dimness of the observation lounge, twice-reflected galaxyshine limned his profile.

“Another excellent question,” I said. I felt intensely aware of how distant we were from everything homey and comforting. How long it would take help to reach us—help we couldn’t even signal for.

How far we had to fall.

“I suppose there’s one way to find out. Singer, can we be ready to bolt if we have to?”

Smugly, the shipmind answered, “We already are.”

The Prize did not use an EM drive of the usual sort for sublight travel. Rather, it glided on manipulated gravity, accelerating with smooth rapidity as it surfed down a wave of space-time toward the heavy mystery at the bottom of this particular well. We did not race directly toward the mass, but rather came at it on a long, looping curve that would be easy to transmute to an orbit—or an exit strategy.

I tried not to consider what would happen if whatever lay at the bottom of this well were to reach out with some weapon and swat us. What kind of weapons might such a thing have? What kind of object might such a thing be?

As we drew closer the structure slowly revealed itself. The massive enigma at the bottom of the well was concealed behind a swarm consisting of smaller but still enormous plates or scales or what-have-you, revealed in the galaxyshine of the Milky Way we’d left behind to be huge flat objects. It was the gaps between them—in their looping, overlapping orbits—that showed moving glimpses of the glowering crimson light beyond.

“Spectrographic analysis suggests that there is a star in there,” Singer said. “A red giant. A dim one.”

“I wish I could say I was surprised,” Connla said. “What’s its diameter?”

“Can’t say exactly,” Singer told him.

Admittedly, it was hard to determine the size of the collection of objects ahead of us, given the lack of things like a definite outline, objects of known size to measure against, much background for it to occlude, and so on. But I had expected a firmer answer.

I guess Singer had me spoiled.

“We’ll have a better idea as we get closer,” Singer said. “I should tell you that my spectrographic analysis indicates that the star is nearing the end of its lifespan.”

“How near are we talking, exactly?”

“Precise numbers are hard to give. Stars in this size category measure their existence in tens of millions of ans, not billions, however.”

“Live fast, die young, leave a highly radioactive corpse?”

“Hawking radiation, in this case.”

“I don’t understand,” I said. I realized too late I could have sensoed the answer. I was out of practice, I guess.

“He means,” Connla said, “when stars this big run out of fuel, they tend to expand. Violently. Then to collapse into black holes. Wells.”

“Oh,” I said.

“Think of the science we can do!” Singer exulted.

“Cheer up,” Connla replied. “Odds are good nothing will happen while we’re here. And if it does, we can run away.”

“Can we run away fast enough?” What even happened, I wondered, if you tried to drop into white space while a star was going supernova behind you?

He did that thing where I could hear the shrug in his voice. “If we can’t, I don’t expect it will be uncomfortable for long.”

Getting anywhere in space takes a long time, speaking from a human perspective. Either you’re moving extremely fast, but wherever you might be headed is incomprehensibly far away, or your goal is a lot closer, but you’re not cruising along at such an exceptional clip anymore.

Actually, when you’re moving the fastest, relatively speaking, you’re technically not moving at all, just scrunching space-time up around yourself. And half the time when you’re moving more slowly, all your energy expenditure is actually going to the process of slowing your v.

Basically, it’s all an enormous pain in the ass. But better than being stuck in one solar system, or worse, on a fragile old tub of a generation ship. Sitting in one not even particularly hospitable solar system is just kind of asking for it, in terms of extinction events and not having taken out adequate insurance against them. In my more misanthropic moods, and considering the crimes of which I, myself (my past self), was guilty of, it occurred to me that the systers might have been better off in the long run if we hominids had just stayed home.

Then I remembered the Jothari rendering ship, and how the Jothari had wound up worldless in the first place, and I got over my cynical pretensions. Humans were far from the only species capable of atrocity.

Anyway, we were on a long, slow spiral down the well toward the Koregoi megastructure, and we had—the spacer’s mantra—plenty of time to kill. So we spent it taking measurements and trying to get our hands on Farweather. I was honestly a lot more interested in the former. The physics weren’t really my thing, but the engineering certainly was, and whatever was going on down there was fascinating and complex enough to eat up all my cycles and then some.

Honestly, I was grateful for the distraction, because I was dealing with the ongoing pressure of trying to ignore the fact that Farweather was out there doing who-knew-what, and she was somehow—despite the best efforts of Singer, six constables, and a Goodlaw—basically a ghost. We couldn’t track her; we couldn’t even find her.

Connla and I ran Ops, and between our analysis of the dense and multilayered swarm of alien artifacts surrounding the enormous star that we were approaching and our constant security surveillance to make sure Farweather wasn’t affecting the operations of our barely understood alien ship, we were pretty busy. At least Connla and I were getting pretty comfortable with the design and structure of the ship, and with Singer’s help, learning how to operate many of its functions.

We also got some of the hydroponics functioning again, thanks to a gift of water and plants from I’ll Explain It To You Slowly. Singer showed me how to use a siphon. Siphons are weird. Gravity is weird.

The Prize got a Synarche transponder and a formal name, registry, and call sign. It felt like the end of an era. We were legit again.

His formal, registered name was Synarche General Vessel I Rise From Ancestral Night, which I admit was pretty. The Hlaoodari poets’ guild charged with naming ships registered to the Core generally does a good job, and they do take suggestions. They’d sent this one out, along with the transponder, in case SJV I’ll Explain It To You Slowly did catch up with us. So we were preregistered.

If the Prize were a Terran vessel, we could have named him ourselves. Which is why Synarche vessels have names like I Find A Way When Ways Are Closed, and Terran Registry vehicles have numbers, and if they have names they’re names like Enterprise or Space Clamshell II.

Bureaucracy is the supermassive black hole at the center of the Synarche that makes the whole galaxy revolve.

We still called the AI Singer. That wasn’t going to change. And they let us keep Koregoi Prize as the call sign. Maybe it wasn’t the best name, but it was what she would always be in my heart.

The architecture of the megastructure was fascinating, and Singer frequently had to make me sleep because I’d gotten so involved in trying to plot the individual orbits of billions of orbiting structures. The swarm, we discovered as we spiraled in, was comprised of more or less flat or slightly curved plates with the diameter of small moons. They did not orbit on a plane or an ecliptic; rather they overlapped in a patently artificial manner that must have taken constant and elaborate microadjustments to maintain, with the end result that they utilized 98 percent of the photons that the dying sun produced.

It had probably, I realized, been every photon, before the star began expanding. I wondered if they had individual agendas and competed for the light like plants. I wondered what they did with all that energy. Less energy now than when they were built, but still an incomprehensible amount.

The cats, meanwhile, had discovered one thing about gravity that pleased them, which was that they could sleep on top of humans, who were cushiony and warm.

It’s good to serve a purpose, even if you can’t figure out what the alien tech is for.

My denial was operating gloriously well, and I was actually starting to wonder if Farweather—who, let’s face it, didn’t exactly have a stellar shop safety record—had carelessly gotten herself killed in some gruesome mishap and was desiccating in an inconvenient corner. It was comforting to imagine that the reason neither Singer nor I had managed to locate her was because her corpse was crammed into a crawlway somewhere in this vast underpopulated ship, decomposing quietly.

We probably would have smelled her, though. Or maybe she’d accidentally spaced herself—poetic justice—and we’d never noticed. Ancient alien utility fogs could be tricky, after all. There was no predicting what they might do if mismanaged.

I kept telling myself that it was too much to hope for. But deep in my heart of hearts, I really wanted the Prize to have taken a dislike to her. It was that most atavistic and sophipathic of human emotions, jealousy.

And I was enjoying it far too much to tune it out.

Worse things happen in space, is all I’m saying.

Sadly, just as I was becoming most fully engaged with my very satisfying fantasy world, that was when we got a little evidence that Farweather was still with us.

The Prize’s alarm klaxons were just that: real, old-fashioned, audible klaxons. Useless if she lost air pressure. Not like a proper klaxon that you feel in your bones.

When they went off, though, every one of us jumped.

“Singer!” I yelped. “What the Well is that?”

“Collating.” He liked classic entertainment, too.

“You’re still not fucking funny.”

“I actually was collating,” he said. He sounded hurt. “But I know you’re under a lot of stress, so I won’t make the obvious crack about, if you’re in such a hurry, analyze it yourself. Preliminary indications are that Constables Grrrs and Murtaugh encountered a booby trap, most likely set by Farweather, while on patrol. Murtaugh is injured but not killed. The explosion did some structural damage to the ship, which the ship is repairing. Thus the alerts. Cheeirilaq and the others are responding.”

“What?” I yelled. “No! I know how she thinks! It’s a trap! She’s got to be luring them in. It’s textbook—”

“Of course it is,” Singer said soothingly. “You’re not the only professional on this boat.”

I spared a moment to feel good that he thought I was a pro.

“She could be luring them away.” Connla poked his head out of his sleeping bag. “That way she can have a clear shot at Ops, and at us.”

I stared at him.

He sat up and spread his hands appeasingly. “Sorry. But it’s what I’d do in her place. After all, what does she have to lose?”

“Battle stations!” I said.

Only about half a second before Singer did.

They missed her.

That was the bad news. The bad news could have been a lot worse, though, because we got Murtaugh back in one piece and probably repairable—and definitely capable of being stabilized—with the materials on hand. Which was good, because it meant we didn’t have to make the terrible decision between letting Murtaugh die, or turning right around and trying to chase down the I’ll Explain It To You Slowly, which had cryo tanks that might get a seriously wounded person back to the Core still capable of being revived.

Sergeant Halbnovalk stabilized Murtaugh and brought them back to the observation deck. The other four constables continued on, and in the process found and disarmed three more devices without anyone else being injured.

Murtaugh would live, despite some acid burns and a little shrapnel. They were already treated, sedated, and resting comfortably in a hammock, nursed by Bushyasta. Halbnovalk was apparently not a hoverer, as she’d gone right back out to rejoin her team once Murtaugh could be left.

She’d given me the gels of pain medication and instructions on how to use them. At least I was good for something.

I sort of wished I’d been with them for the chase. We got senso and their ayatana—they were also backlinked into ours, just in case Connla was right and Farweather came gunning at Ops, as we’d started calling our converted observation deck slash HQ. But it would have been fun to be out there on the hunt alongside Cheeirilaq and the constables. It was probably antisocial, but adrenaline raged through me at the thought.

The adrenaline was a symptom of something still not quite right. It got me to tune myself back without even Singer’s suggestion once I noticed how atavistic I was feeling. It definitely had a little too much of a smell of Farweather’s influence for me to feel comfortable letting that desire to be in on the kill possess me.

That didn’t attenuate the disappointment when there wasn’t any kill. I felt it like a punch when she slipped away from the constable teams and didn’t even bother to show up and try to take control of Ops.

“So what was all that in aid of?” Connla asked, once we were all pretty confident the excitement was over. The teams had given up their search and were on the way home.

“It obviously wasn’t to pick us off,” I said, “unless her plan malfunctioned somehow.”

“I think it was to distract us,” Singer said.

I asked, “But from what?”

“If I knew that,” the shipmind responded dryly, “it wouldn’t be much of a distraction, would it?”

That was when the hull began to sing.