Ancestral Night

CHAPTER 30

I WOKE UP IN THE HOSPITAL. Core General, in fact, because that was how fancy I was now.

I met a nice doctor there. Her name was K’kk’jk’ooOOoo, and she had beautiful gray eyes and was sleek and fast.

Unfortunately, she was a dolphin-like K’juUUuuU who came from a water world, so it never would have worked out. But it turns out that sonar is a really useful sense for an internist.

Also, it tickles.

K’kk’jk’ooOOoo was a specialist in fox interface problems, and she’d been brought in to figure out how to fix the malfunctioning connections in my much-abused one, or replace it if necessary. The rest of my body was already fixed. They’d grown me a new liver and colon while I was asleep in a tank. Good idea. Who wants to be awake for that?

The first thing I asked about was the Baomind, and I was assured that rescue operations were under way. The first wave of Baomind mirror disks had actually been elected by the collective for evacuation and brought to the Core huddled inside the white coils of the Prize and the other ships in the rescue fleet. More ships were en route to bring back the next wave, and as far as anybody could tell from this far away, its primary had not exploded.

Yet.

But any minute now.

The second thing I asked about was getting the war crime removed from my dermis. K’kk’jk’ooOOoo told me regretfully that she didn’t think it could be done without killing me. I hoped she was telling the truth, and it wasn’t just that the Synarche wanted to study me. I mean, of course the Synarche wanted to study me. I hoped they might be close enough to what I still hoped they were not to lie to me about it.

There were good surprises, too, and the best surprise was that Singer was here, in the hospital. He was functioning as a subsidiary wheelmind, operating systems in human resources and logistics, as a compassionate gesture. When I was well enough, we were both to be seconded to the Prize investigation team: me as an engineer, and he would take over as the Prize’s permanent shipmind. Along with our cats.

We’d be stationed right here in the Core. And not too far from Connla, who had a new job flying ambulance ships.

He was really happy about it. You get to go as fast as you want, and other vessels are supposed to get out of your way but are bad enough at it that the flying is challenging.

And apparently, he was good.

After many boring medical adventures, it turned out that the problem wasn’t the fox at all, but the connections.

Functional connections in the brain are based on use. The longer my fox spent as a doorstop, the more the brain-device connections had degraded. Therefore, I needed more therapy and practice afterward before I could work with it properly again.

So playing immersion games in my fox was… technically… part of my mandated therapy.

I found out from Cheeirilaq, who was also now stationed in the Core, taking care of various legal difficulties, that Farweather had also survived the transition home. She was in a different wing, however, and under guard. The Prison Wheel, as it was colloquially called.

It had a different staff. Most of the Core General doctors wouldn’t serve there unless it was a matter of life and death, because they could not bring themselves to treat their patients as prisoners.

The doctors who could manage it had installed a suppressor in Farweather’s midbrain to keep her from activating her Koregoi symbiote, acting under Singer’s advice and direction.

I shuddered to think of it. She had not consented to that. But I shuddered worse to think of what she’d do in a hospital full of sick systers whose very existence she despised.

Moral compromises don’t stop happening even when everyone involved is trying to do the right thing.

Which left that offspring of a compost heap, Colonel Habren. The gardener. Who—Cheeirilaq informed me—had filed every charge in the book against us.

Discredit the witnesses. Why not? What do you have to lose?

Well, the charges didn’t stick. We might have been able to sting them for filing punitive charges, but the fact remained that we had driven a little recklessly. And our charges against them didn’t stick either.

Farweather apparently wouldn’t snitch. And we had absolutely no proof.

We knew. And the Synarche knew. And Singer knew. And Cheeirilaq knew.

And their attitude, apparently, was “That’s nice; do something about it.”

…Maybe tomorrow.

As an experiment, I got my hormones formally turned back on.

It turned out I still wasn’t in love with Farweather.

Thank everything holy, the Way and the Path and the bright and dark and iron gods of Entropy and Irony, the Gods of the Ark that protected generation ships and hell, probably protected the Baomind also. My taste was terrible, but it was not that bad.

Once they were on, well. I discovered I’d kind of missed them. They scared me… but I decided I didn’t have to act on feelings.

They were just feelings.

They didn’t have to run my life.

The last time I saw Zanya Farweather, she was being loaded onto a transport, having been deemed well enough to stand trial. I put in a request to meet with her before she went. It was, to my surprise, approved.

I suspect Cheeirilaq put in a word for me.

She’d wasted in the tanks, and in treatment. So had I, but it was more evident on her, with her planetary muscles. She looked like a rail, clavicle and jawbone and cheeks projecting, breasts slack, a little fleshy potbelly showing where her body was keeping what fat it had managed to hang on to while consuming all its muscle.

It hurt me to see the crescent of brilliantly reflective chrome adhered to the bottom arc of her skull. The damper.

Well, it was awful. But I accepted that it needed to be there.

Galaxies danced across her drawn skin. Mine moved in reflection.

She was still beautiful. I still wasn’t in love with her.

Her guards drew back as I approached. They stayed close enough to intervene if she—shackled, locked out of her own body except as permitted by the tightly engineered, quicksilver AI stuck on her head whose only purpose was to thwart her—“tried something.”

I know she came from outside. I know she was raised by monsters who ate each other as a matter of course.

I know we had to give her time to want to be managed before we could teach her to manage herself.

Had the AI whose life’s work was now making sure Zanya Farweather didn’t use her alien symbiote to crush the entire prison wing of the hospital gotten a vote in where it served?

Farweather looked me right in the eye. Without preamble or any kind of gentle transition, she said, “You secretly wanted me to win. You’d be happier if you could allow yourself to admit it.”

What I actually wanted, deep in my barbarian heart, was to see her messily dead in a half dozen variously sized pieces. But I was too self-aware—and too beset with ethics!—to act on that.

There was no point in relitigating old woes. We need each other, and we need literature, and we need knowledge—and we need, very much, to try to be accountable for our own failings and to live up to our best selves. That reality might seem subjective and foolish to Farweather, but it seems objective and rational to me.

We cannot choose where we come from, but we can choose where we are going, and we can choose the routes we’re willing to take to try to get there.

“Whatever lets you sleep at night, Farweather.”

She rubbed the shiny metal arc fused to her skull. “They used you.”

“Oh. And you didn’t?”

I thought that would quell her. I didn’t want to have this conversation, and I really didn’t want to have this conversation in front of some certain percentage of Justice.

It didn’t.

She said, “You still blame yourself for Niyara.”

I made my expression stone.

Zanya Farweather could never take a fucking hint. “If you blame yourself, that means you think you had the power to stop it.”

“But I didn’t?” A second after I spoke, I cursed myself for responding. But I had, and now I was stuck with it.

“You didn’t,” Farweather confirmed.

I shook my head. “Bullshit. I knew Niyara. If I hadn’t been blinded by my hormones, I would have seen her coming. Seen that she was using me.”

“But you didn’t see her coming.”

“Now you sound like you’re blaming me.”

She settled back against the wall. “It feels good to pretend you’re to blame, doesn’t it?”

“What?” I said. “It feels awful.”

“But it lets you assert some power over the situation. Some agency. If it’s your fault, you weren’t just a helpless dupe, right? But if somebody else tells you that you weren’t just a helpless dupe, you get angry.”

I looked at her.

She looked at me. The only light came from the airlock on the prison transport, two steps away with its outer door open. It fell in dim stripes across her face.

I’d missed it, somewhere. The place where she’d moved the goalposts. I could feel that it had happened, but I couldn’t see the spot.

“They’re probably recording this,” I said.

“They probably are.” She shrugged.

“I do think about having done something different,” I admitted. What did it hurt me to be honest with her? To be vulnerable?

She was going away.

I said, “I think about if there was something I might have missed. It’s not… intrusive. Not anymore, not the way it used to be.”

“Sure,” she said. “You got your brain fiddled with to remove the guilt, the blame. Even the memories. So why don’t you fiddle your brain to make the rest of it go away also?”

“I thought your lot didn’t hold with brain-fiddling.”

She winked. “I don’t judge how other people live their lives.”

I leaned against the wall and watched her through the bars. “You’d rather be in jail forever than submit to Recon.”

“They could just force me.”

I smiled. “We’re not complete barbarians.”

She laughed. She tapped her suppressor.

It almost felt companionable. I thought I might miss her.

I said, “You know that thing about not having a real me? That I told you on the Prize?”

Her face smoothed. “I think I remember it.”

I smiled.

“I take that back,” I said. “The real me is the me I’ve decided to be. Somebody decided to be that person. Somebody built her. That’s the real me. And not the me anybody else thinks I ought to be, or ought to have been.”

She frowned.

I looked at her.

She looked at me.

“Goodbye, Zanya,” I said. “I hope you figure some stuff out, eventually.”

I turned away.

The deck plates rattled faintly as she stepped forward. Two constables stepped forward as well. They didn’t touch her yet, and I approved.

She said, “Enjoy belonging to the machine, babes.”

Another rustle as she stepped back, while I walked away. I let her have the last word. I didn’t really need to answer.

It didn’t feel so bad, to belong.