Ancestral Night

CHAPTER 3

“THIS ISN’T A KOREGOI SHIP,” I argued, struggling up. I hate gs. My joints ached, instantly. I swear I could feel myself being compacted like a nugget of refuse. “It’s new, for one thing.”

Well, I didn’t know how new it was. But I’d interfaced senso of Koregoi wrecks—everybody did, if they had any kind of education—and seen one with my own eyes in a museum, and they did not look like this. They were… plastic. Not in the sense of being manufactured from petrochemicals, because they were also proof against just about every possible form of damage known to the systers, or us, but… extruded-looking. Or possibly grown. Not manufactured-looking, not full of square corners and round arcs and similar architectural detritus of species who have a fetish for regular geometry.

Nobody knew very much about the Koregoi: not even the oldest systers were old enough to have histories of them. We didn’t even know if the Koregoi were one thing—one species—or a lot of different things, such as multiple ancient forerunner species. They had left structures on a few worlds, and derelict ships and architecture here and there around the galaxy. We didn’t know how they had done what they had done, or what they had been like, or where they had gone when they had vanished. If they had vanished, and not just… died out somehow. There were physical remains from a dozen places that might be Koregoi bodies, or might not. So the Koregoi—the people who came before us—might have been one civilization, or fifteen. It was a blanket term for all of it.

What we did know was that they had apparently had technology that nobody in the galaxy could touch, todia. Like artificial gravity, which engineering people like me but much fancier than me had deduced the Koregoi had, because of the arrangement of the wrecks we’d come across. After millennians of abandonment, mostly crashed on planets, none of the technology had been salvageable enough to be back-engineered.

Some of their artifacts had been discovered in apparently working order—maybe—but they tended toward solid-state designs with mysterious functions and operation. There was a Koregoi hoverdisk in the Galactic History Museum at the Saga-star system in the Core. It was a thin metal plate, covered in arcane and beautiful carved symbols, that as near as anybody could tell just sat there a half meter off of any surface that exerted a reasonable gravitational attraction and slid frictionlessly and inertialessly one way or another when you pushed it.

Nobody had been able to figure out how it worked. Or duplicate the effect. And it had been discovered by the Synarche while my species was still devoting its innovative capabilities to building a better stone hand-axe.

And yet, here I was in a ship. A ship with working artificial gravity, and I had the skinned palms to prove it.

Whatever syster had built this vessel was a lot bigger than us, anatomically speaking, but they liked their circular hatches and square locker doors just as much as we did. And the tech, from what I could see of the corridor, wasn’t that far in advance of a perfectly nice, three-decan-behind-the-times, well-maintained little ship like Singer. I mean, this was a much more elaborate vessel, obviously, meant to house more crew and make longer hauls—but it was full of hand controls and touch pads and other perfectly recognizable elements of running a ship if you didn’t want to be completely screwed and adrift in space if your shipmind started going buggy or your senso link went down.

I dogged the hatch behind me, which is a reflex so deeply bred in spacer bones I almost forgot to mention doing it. Everything tied down and tidy, always, unless you are actually eating it right this second, or using it to screw something to the wall.

My afthands were already starting to bother me by the time I was done. The suit’s gloves were designed for grabbing, not walking, and let’s be honest here: walking on afthands in gravity is uncomfortable even with proper shoes, though you do get used to it and it’s not enough of a drawback to keep anybody from getting their feet refitted. If you’re in space full-time, they’re basically useful unless you’re on station and out-wheel, and how often is anybody on station?

How often do you find gravity out here, anyway? I had my hind limbs fixed basically the instant I left the clade, and I’ve never regretted it. That walk down that corridor, though, was the closest I’d ever come.

“Guys,” I said, looking around. “I think the gravity is a retrofit.” It was pretty significant gravity, too—I was guessing by how heavy and awkward I felt, and how my suit was digging in everywhere, that it was a little bit over an Earth-standard, which I’d rarely endured.

I was going to tire out fast and we all knew it.

“Hmm,” said Singer. “I see what you mean.”

One of the things I loved about working with Singer was that even if he’d figured something out before I did, and hadn’t pointed it out, he never felt the need to mention it once I figured it out for myself. Some shipminds can be a little lordly and insecure. Of course, a lot of those shipminds probably wouldn’t sign into a tugboat on a salvage detail so they would have the opportunity to see as much of the galaxy as possible while paying off their inception.

Anyway, I knew he had noticed, or was noticing, all the same little details I had: that the locker doors that around this accessway were lined up as if horizontal led toward the center of the ship, not down toward the floor. And there were locker doors in the floor, too, and carpet all over everything.

“Who the heck can just install gravity in an existing ship, though?” I blinked sweat off my lashes. At least it just flicked off onto my cheek and faceplate instead of floating around inside my helmet until I managed to bump it up against the absorbent lining. “I mean, who can install gravity, period? If it were that easy, we’d all quit floating around except when it’s convenient.”

“Or fun,” Connla put in.

I ignored him.

“Well,” he went on, “obviously, the former operators of the Milk Chocolate Marauder.”

I ignored him some more.

Singer said, “So you suppose they’re using dark gravity to do that, somehow? And if they can use dark gravity to manufacture weight in their interior, do you suppose they can use it to maneuver?”

I had more immediate concerns. “Do you suppose the bridge is at the center of that thing?”

“It’s where I’d put it,” Singer agreed, seeming to consciously rein in the very theoretical physics.

I forced myself to start moving again, trying not to listen too hard to the sound of my own breathing in the suit. My ox supply was great, though I was burning through it faster than I liked because I was out of shape for being under gs. I was just psyching myself out for some reason. A few seconds of self-contemplation—and continued progress down the corridor, which was about to end in a choice of three hatches—and I figured out why.

My headlamp flickered over surfaces. There was no general interior lighting, which might have been a design choice, a power interrupt, or a technical flaw. On the other hand, the gravity was working, and that had to use energy, right? And I could see readout lights blinking and flickering on panels here and there. And here and there, small task lights burned over surfaces as if the crew had just left them on when they went home.

“This is creepy.”

“It is a salvage operation.” Connla was on a roll.

“No, seriously. There’s no reason for this ship to be dead like this.”

“What do you mean?” My business partner could make the switch from dragging me to dead serious in microseconds.

I got to the choice of hatches and picked the one in the middle. There was a sensor—an old-fashioned mechanical gauge—built into it, and I guessed that the fat umber line on the top that the needle was resting on was the “no air pressure beyond this point” warning, because the rest of the lines shaded from that color to a delicious-looking creamy dark chocolate shade. These guys liked linear latches and linear readouts, apparently.

And apparently I really needed to do something about my blood sugar.

I tongued a yeast tablet from my helmet dispenser. The guys would just have to listen to my crunching, and my voice getting powdery, until I washed it down.

“The ring is intact; there’s no sign of external damage; and the interior is… It looks good, guys. Really good. Pristine. There’s power.”

“Just evacuated,” Singer said, meaning the atmosphere rather than the people.

“And no bodies,” Connla helped.

“And no shipmind,” Singer said. “I’m working on cracking their language. Probably easier and faster to learn it than to write and install a new OS.”

“Less buggy anyway,” Connla said.

I would like to say that I paused a moment to be impressed that Singer was debating whether it was faster to learn an entire alien language or just rewrite all of their code, but I was actually kind of used to Singer after a decan or so and I had a real tendency to take him for granted. In retrospect, we couldn’t have been luckier in our shipmind, though.

I said, “That’s part of it. It does look evacuated. Both ways. Speaking of which, I’m going to try the middle door.”

“Middle door. Check,” Connla said.

“No lights. No air. No, as you said, bodies. No damage. No people. No floating stuff. No mysterious stains on the upholstery. It looks like it just got out of a port after a nice retrofit, steam cleaning, and maybe a new paint job a standard week ago. And then somebody loaded it up, brought it out light-centads from anywhere somebody might reasonably be going, and… parked it here. And then abandoned ship. In white space.”

“Well,” Singer said, also helping, “the gravity works.”

“I wish I were in the same room with you, so I could throw a pencil at you.”

“Digital pencil.” Connla snickered.

“The Flying Dutchman,” Singer said.

I opened the middle hatch. Remember the hatch? Right, I opened it.

Another airless, unlit chamber beyond. This looked like a rack room, standard issue—extra-large. There were cozy, padded indentations in the walls and floor, with tethers to hold you there. Only about three-fourths of them were oriented so as to be usefully horizontal, however, and sleeping in a third of those would involve being walked over.

“They gave up a lot of bunk space to have that gravity installed,” I said. “I think the Milk Chocolate Marauder is a… not a prototype. What’s the word I want?” I quicksearched and came up with it. “A test-of-concept. Somebody took this existing vessel and installed this tech in it, to see if it would work out and what the immediate flaws were before they spent the resources prototyping.”

My muscles ached. My spine felt like somebody was stepping on my head, and my afthands were killing me. I crouched, and rested my elbows on my knees. “Guys, I need a break.”

“Take five,” Connla said.

I drank some water and chewed another yeast tablet. Mmm, yeast. Just like mommas used to make.

“Logically,” Singer said, “if you were a species who found lack of gravity even more physiologically damaging than you humans do, you’d be eager to find a technological solution. Do you think they would have gone with their full normal gravity? Or something a little less fatiguing?”

I was about ready to lie down on one of those padded shelves from dealing with what they had installed, and I’d only been in it for ten minutes. “I’m against gravity in general. Nasty stuff.”

There were syster races that couldn’t run their circulatory systems without it, though. Or keep their electrolyte balance. Which was a lot worse than the human problem of our bones falling apart. Singer had a spinlounge for us to exercise in—a little bubble on his belly that rotated and made gs.

Connla and I were supposed to spend about a standard hour a dia in there. He was better about it than I was. But he was planet-born. And liked looking muscular. I wished I’d been more diligent.

I might have been wishing past-me had traded past suffering for current suffering, but somewhere back there, past-me was probably gloating about having shifted the load.

Speaking of bones falling apart, mine felt like they were doing that right now. Chips working loose as I waited. Inches of height being crushed away.

Connla said, “So if this is partial pull, just enough to get by on, their homeworld is pretty dense.”

“Or pretty large. And they’re pretty large too,” Singer said. “That narrows down the syster field a little.”

“About half again as wide and half again as tall as a big Terran,” I agreed, eyeing the bunks. “Really heavy, if this is like one-quarter g for them. Dense? Muscular? Or lightly engineered?”

“Are you recovered enough to keep moving?” Singer asked, conciliatory.

“Don’t blow smoke in my intakes,” I answered, and stood. I managed not to groan, too. Very loudly, anyway.

The other side of the room had a drape, not another hatch to fight with, which was soothing. Rings at both top and bottom rattled as I slid it back. I remembered to step over the bottom rod, and left it pulled open behind me.

This pass-through led me directly to what seemed like it had to be a galley. Not the ship’s galley, I didn’t think—it seemed too small for all this space, and… “Who builds a starship this big, anyway?” I asked.

Singer said, “I have been asking myself the same thing, Haimey. It’s a very strange allocation of resources. Even if you had unlimited resources, which of course physics eventually interferes with, fuel is expensive to carry, because you need fuel to carry your fuel, and the cost stacks. Big ships cost more. No one needs the space for cargo, because there is no cargo this bulky worth shipping at interstellar distances. The evidence suggests that the crew species is large, but not that much larger than humans. And the more sensor data I retrieve regarding the target vessel, the more it seems that much of the interior is hollow. There’s an open space, an interior cavity, taking up five-sixths or so of its volume.”

“Looks like the crew fended for themselves, foodwise, rather than having a centralized kitchen and mess,” I said, looking around at what appeared to be a prep area.

Plenty of syster races out there did not make Food Time the social bonding activity that my species tended to. They tended to be pretty utilitarian in their dining habits, too.

“This galley is pretty standard for zero g, actually. Food storage in here—” I pulled open the drawers one by one. There had been some atmosphere left in there: it puffed out and crystallized, falling to the deck in deep-space snow quite fast, with no air pressure to slow it. Looked like oxy and a little water vapor, maybe some carbon dioxide. Dense mix by the quantity of snow, but that made sense if they were from a heavy world. “And this looks like a microwave heating or sterilization unit of some sort. The gravity is definitely a refit, and a new one. But you were saying, about resource allocation. Different out here, of course, where you have to bring or make everything. But it’s not like we’ve been paying a station fee for air for… centuries, now. Ever since the Synarche, right? There’s enough stuff to go around.”

“There will always be those who benefit from inequality, and so seek to perpetuate it,” Singer said darkly. “Humans have struggled throughout existence with the hierarchal desire.”

“Except when we’ve embraced it,” I answered. Singer likes history. And, well help me, politics. “I wish I’d clipped a nanospanner set. This panel looks jury-rigged, like it was repaired in flight. I want to see what’s behind it.”

I felt along the edges, prying a little.

Singer was on a roll. “Even if there’s enough of every resource for every individual to allocate as much of it as they desire to any personal whim, there are those whose personal whims include being able to lord it over the other guy because they have more stuff than he does. And there are those whose personal whims involve having special stuff that nobody else can have.”

“Keeps the fine artists in business,” I said.

Connla said, “If they get too antisocial about it, there’s rightminding.”

“Or they can ship themselves off to the Republic of Pirates,” Singer agreed. Which wasn’t what the pirates called themselves and their weird, loosely organized, retrograde association of space hideouts. But there they were, robbing colony worlds and the occasional packet ship or passenger ferry, making their money the old-fashioned way. There were regular rumors in the news packets that the pirates would soon rise up and strike a blow for democracy, because that makes about as much sense as instituting a Galactic Empire or something. People get very enamored of these archaic forms of government, and Singer likes to tell us about them in detail.

According to Singer, it turns out that ten thousand amateurs taken on average are usually better at coming up with a workable solution than one expert is. Anybody that’s ever heard an unrehearsed crowd sing a familiar melody accurately has witnessed this in action.

Democracy was a low-tech hack for putting this into practice. We have better hacks now.

I guess it was the best they could do at the time. But it strikes me as a bad way, in the long term, of assuring both communal well-being and individual freedom of choice and expression, as the groups and individuals with the most social dominance will wind up getting their way—and enforcing their norms on everyone. Might as well go back to everybody squabbling over resources and living in stone castles and hitting each other with spears.

I still remember the trip when he was obsessed with the utopian communists out near the Crushed Velvet Sea Slug system—speaking of archaic systems—and how their system compared both favorably and unfavorably with the Synarche. Both, for example, guarantee a humane subsistence, but the Synarche uses datagen to allot resources above that for specific, socially beneficial purposes, based on how they benefit the collective—and individuals and polities within it as well.

One of the major differences, and I think the one that interested Singer the most (anybody who tells you that AIs don’t have agendas or emotional involvement in their decisions is living in the twentieth century), is the way the Sea Slug folks handled debt as opposed to the way the Synarche does.

Let’s be honest here, debt is a mechanism of social control. That’s one point Singer makes over and over again, which he didn’t have to work too hard to convince me of: clades believe heavily in repaying your debts to the family, and they weaponize that ethos. Emotionally speaking. Guilt is a currency.

The Sluggers assume that everybody has a societal debt which is to be paid forward to others, to the best of their means. I agree with that, on a lot of fronts, especially since it circumvents a certain kind of progenitor guilt trip that was the foundational logic of the clade I was born into. The Synarche, meanwhile, believes in obligations that flow both ways between community and individual, and I also agree with that. It’s an ideal worth serving. But no system is perfect, and it uses those obligations—incurred by creation—as a social control on AIs and a means of enforcing their service. A kind of indenturehood that, to be fair, does pay for the resources allocated to developing new AIs, but if you think somebody hasn’t tweaked the system to the Synarche’s advantage, well. All of history involves somebody taking advantage of somebody else.

It’s not a perfect system of government, I guess I’m saying. But it does level the gravity incline somewhat. Which I think is what the Republic of Pirates takes so much offense to, given their singularity-devour-star philosophy. And then there’s the black market, and the trade in illegal and stolen goods. Can’t get those with a resource allotment.

Good times.

While I was pondering politics—and pondering how much Singer had rubbed off on me—I kept fiddling with the architecture. I finally hit the right spot, or the right angle, and the panel popped off into my glove. Wiring behind it—nothing I could make headway on, though I squinted for a few moments. There was a splice, nice professional job. Not microcircuitry: whoever built this hulk meant to be able to repair it with materials at hand. Which meant they expected port opportunities to be limited, I supposed.

“Maybe it is a smuggler,” I said, my heart sinking. Not as bad for us as a pirate, and there were bounties on recovered ships and property. But not great, either. “So what do you smuggle that’s that big, Singer? Contraband is little things. Cultural treasures. Dangerous foodstuffs with a thrill market. You don’t smuggle a bridge or a big stone Buddha offworld, do you?”

“Depends on how much the big stone Buddha is worth on the illegal art market.”

“Keep going in,” Connla suggested. “Let’s see for ourselves how bad it is.”

“Wish we’d done something else with the afternoon,” I said glumly.

“Relax,” Singer said. “You’re forgetting something.”

I waited for him to finish, and put the panel cover back on. Force of habit, again: not leaving stuff lying around where it could kill you.

“How much resource-justification do you think that artificial gravity tech is worth?”

I had been standing up, bitching to myself about the gravity. I stopped, one hand on the galley wall, stunned.

“What if it’s under military interdict?”

“I don’t think it is, because I can’t find any blank spots in my science banks. So let’s assume for now that we get a finder’s fee for that,” Singer said cheerfully. “We’re in the black, Haimey. All we have to do is get this prize back in reasonable shape, and I can buy out my inception, and you and Connla can take a nice long vacation someplace sandy and circuit-corroding.”

“Like you have any circuits to corrode.” But I said it automatically. My head was still swimming. Recovered tech—or a new innovation—retrieved from an outlaw vessel. Yes, that would clear a lot of our obligation. Maybe all of it. Justify our resource footprint for a good, long while.

And I had to have it pointed out to me. Some hot-shit salvage operator I turned out to be.

“Okay,” I said. “I feel better now.”

There wasn’t much else interesting along the way to the core. A string of cabins like a string of beads, punctuated by short corridors similar to the first one, with somewhere between two hatches and five. There were hatches in what had become the floors and ceilings; inconvenient for now, and more evidence of a retrofit. It looked like the corridors served as storage and as pressure locks, but if so, they hadn’t worked: the hatches were almost all closed, but nowhere within the chambers was there atmosphere.

Or people.

Or bodies.

Or, I realized, any clutter. I mean, sure, space. We are all tidy, or we don’t last long. You tuck things away, hang them in nets, magnetize them to bulkheads, clip them to strings. But these people had been living under gravity for at least the duration of this voyage—okay, that was an assumption, but a pretty safe one—and they would have left something lying around. Alien socks rolled under bunks. Hairbrushes, toothbrushes, scale brushes, feather oil, hoof picks, claw combs. The organic dust that living bodies all seemed to shed, no matter what the integument holding their innards together is.

This ship was clean. I swiped a glove along a brown-anodized metal surface in what looked like a bio or chemistry lab. Not even a trace of powder showed in my headlamp. Maybe it was a survey ship from another galaxy that had met a terrible accident, and not smugglers at all? That would also explain why it was so strange and far away.

“I think they got decompressed,” Connla said, putting voice to my nausea.

“And then somebody came through and closed all the hatches and turned off the lights?”

“The hatches are probably on an emergency override,” he said reasonably. “Would you want a hatch that didn’t shut when the next chamber decompressed?”

“But these didn’t. Or not quite fast enough.”

All three of us were silent for a moment, contemplating being explosively decompressed out of a ship while it was inside folded space. Would you even feel anything? Would you have time to be scared?

I shook my head, trying to mix my wits together. “And the lights are probably on a timer. So… sure. The ship blew, somehow? And having blown, the safety interlocks belatedly kicked in and it just shut itself down and waited?”

“How would it blow that fast? It’s big. Lot of atmosphere volume.”

I touched the next hatch. Opened it.

Looked out through a doorway over a precipice into nothingness and brilliant, folded stars.