Ancestral Night

CHAPTER 6

THE CATS, BEING CATS, WERE suitably ungrateful for their reprieve. By the time I got to check on them, Bushyasta was asleep next to the fridge, her paw hooked into a nylon grab loop. She had earned her name the old-fashioned way, by living up to it.

I had no idea where Mephistopheles had wandered off to.

I edged around Bushyasta and fixed myself a bubble of coffee, feeling relieved that the banter between Connla and me had picked back up in a much more natural and unstrained fashion. It was still going to take us a really long time to get home. A subjective eternity, I realized, as Singer started talking about his political theories again.

Still, not dying made up for a lot.

“Thanks, parasite,” I muttered.

The parasite didn’t answer.

Coffee is amazing, and one benefit of having only cats, an AI, and another human as shipmates is that I can drink it in public areas without grossing out the aliens. Something about the organic esters makes it smell—and taste—vile to just about every other ox-breathing syster I might find myself sharing an atmosphere with, so it’s considered polite to keep that particular stimulant among humans. People coming off the homeworlds are always a little frustrated that it’s considered incredibly rude to walk around with coffee everywhere they go.

This particular serving was the real stuff, too—some beans we keep, unroasted and green so they go stale less quickly, mostly for off-the-books barter with other humans when we need it, but also for special occasions. It’s so much better than the recon I usually wind up drinking that it might as well not even be the same plant.

Not dying was probably a special occasion, so I waited patiently for the cracking sounds and wisps of aroma as Singer roasted me a bubble’s worth of beans, flash-cooled them, scrubbed the smoke, and ground them up for me, then dispensed measured hot water and centrifuged the result to get the grounds out. It was delicious, and the caffeine buzzed pleasantly across my nerves, and I let it ride. Human beings have been bumping and tuning since we first learned how to chew bitter leaves for the alkaloid high; we’re just better at the nuances now.

I was just about to pick up Jane Eyre again, having nothing particular to do for the next couple of decians, when Singer cleared his throat and said, “Thank you for this map, Haimey.”

I let the screen float near me, but hung on to my coffee. If I set it aside, it would probably float there forgotten until it cooled, and this stuff was too good to waste. I savored a sip and said, “You’re welcome.”

“Maps like this would have some value, too,” he said diffidently.

“In more than one way.” I waved at the blurs of light outside, which were now contorting and lensing in rippled tortoiseshell patterns as Singer coasted us around the rim of some giant gravity well. We were accelerating again, too, though I couldn’t feel it through the ship. The parasite was keeping me informed, though, as I was learning to read the information this new sense was feeding me.

We had just become the only ship in the Synarche—as far as I knew—that could navigate and course-correct while in white space.

I didn’t have time to really let the implications sink in, because I was busy running for my life and the lives of my best friends. But I knew it changed everything; it would speed up transit times, make it easier to correct after critical failures like the spin out of control that had gotten us here in the first place, possibly even put Singer and Connla and me out of a job by improving safety in white space and making it that much less likely that ships would get trapped inside white bubbles and not be able to find their way home.

It would have military implications as well. What if a ship could fight without leaving white space? Attack another vessel en passant? Bombard a fragile, infinitely vulnerable planet?

Worlds… were so terribly easy to destroy.

That would make us all the more desirable to the pirates as a prize, if they found out about it.

Well, that was a problem for another dia.

“I don’t follow,” Singer said.

“Don’t you think being able to get there faster on less fuel would be of benefit to us when competing with other tugs?”

“Hmm.” I figured he was running calculations on where the greatest social and personal benefits were.

I was wrong.

“I was just thinking,” Singer said slowly, “of what an operation like ours would have been able to accomplish, even a centad or two ago. So many ships used to get lost.”

“We’re still pulling some of them back,” I reminded him.

“Can you imagine coming out here in all this dark in a sublight ship?” he asked. “Most of the generation ships have never been even located, let alone recovered.”

“Generation ships,” I echoed, feeling a chill.

“At the Eschaton,” Singer said, “various Earth organizations—groups, sects, and even nation-states—sent out generation ships in a desperate bid to save some scrap of humanity, because the best-case scenario did not seem as if it would leave the homeworld habitable for long. One hundred seventy-three ships are known to have made it at least as far as the edge of the solar system.”

“Like stations, with no primary. Just… sort of drifting along, trying to be totally self-sufficient.”

“Yes,” he said.

It was a terrifying risk, a desperation gamble, and we both paused to appreciate it.

Then I said, “But Earth didn’t die.”

“Earth didn’t die,” Singer said. “But those generation ships did. As far as we know, anyway—their planned paths have been searched, once it became trivial to do so, but very few have been recovered.”

Connla looked up from his game board. One hand was resting carelessly inside the projection, and it made him look like his arm was half-amputated.

“Waste it,” Connla breathed. “They lost all of them?”

“One made it,” Singer said. “Sort of. But the people and the shipmind within it had changed too much to be integrated back into society. They took another way out.”

Connla said, “Suicide?”

“They transubstantiated,” Singer said. “Went into machine mind, totally, and took off in swarms of some Koregoi nanotech to inhabit the cosmos.”

“So, suicide,” I said. “With some plausible deniability built in.”

“Apparently,” Singer said, “the tech they were using allowed continuity of experience across platforms.”

“Continuity of experience,” I said. “But the thoughts themselves necessarily change, from meat-mind to machine.”

“Well, they were derived from one of the religious cults anyway, and very into the evolutionary perfection of humanity toward some angelic ideal.”

“Right,” I said. I’d heard of this. The Jacob’s Ladder. A famous ship from history. Like the Flying Dutchman or the Enola Gay. There was always some attraction, of course, to leaving your meat-mind behind and creating a version of yourself that lived entirely in the machine. But that creation wasn’t you; it was a legacy. A recording. A simulation.

Not because of any bullshit about the soul, but because the mind was the meat, and the meat was the mind. You might get something sort of like yourself, a similar AI person. It might even think it was you. But it wouldn’t be you.

Still, I guessed, it was better than nothing.

I wondered whether those swarms were still around, and what they were doing out there if they were. “You think the parasite is a nanoswarm?”

Singer snorted with mechanical laughter, which I took to mean agreement, or at least not seeing any reason to disagree.

He said, “I think there’s insufficient evidence to speculate.”

“That’s Singer for, ‘That’s as good an explanation as any.’ ”

He said, “Funny how, after all those ans of trying and failing to create artificial intelligence, the trick that worked was building artificial personalities. It turns out that emotion, perception, and reason aren’t different things—or if they are, we haven’t figured out how to model that yet. Instead, they’re an interconnected web of thought and process. You can’t build an emotionless, rational, decision-making machine, because emotionality and rationality aren’t actually separate—and all those people who spent literally millennians arguing that they were, were relying on their emotions to tell them that emotions weren’t doing them any good.”

He paused for slightly too great a duration, in that way AIs will when they’re unsure of how long it might take a meatform to process what they’re saying.

I sighed. “Come on, Singer,” I urged. “Bring it home. I know you’ve got it in you.”

He issued a flatulent noise without missing a beat. “You were in a hurry to get somewhere?”

“No, just wondering when we were going to find out where we were going.”

“Tough crowd,” he answered. “But I guess in that case you aren’t in need of softening up. Okay, what I was wondering is this: Is your Koregoi not-a-parasite a sentient? And if so, what is it feeling right now? And what does it want?”

I thought about that. With my emotions and with my logic. For… a few minutes, I guess; my face must have been blank with shock as I worked through the implications.

“I wish you hadn’t said that,” I said.

“It might not be an accurate assessment of the situation.”

That was Singer for comforting. For the first time in a decan what I really wanted was a hug. I took what I could get, instead.

“Well, it is what it is. If it tries to send me smoke signals, I’ll worry about it then. Whatever is going to happen is already happening.” I put my head in my forehands. “Right this second, I’m sort of wishing I could order everyone to shut up.”

“It’s okay,” Connla said kindly. “We’re glad you can’t.”

“But we can program people to be responsible adults!” Singer said.

“And you don’t see a problem with that?”

“Programming an intelligence? It would be hypocritical of me, don’t you think?” Singer had a way of speaking when he was making a point that always made me think of slow, wide-eyed, gently sarcastic blinking.

“Not everybody agrees with their own programming,” I said. “Not everybody likes it. Some of us have gone to lengths to change it.”

“Some of you were raised in emotionally abusive cults,” Singer replied brightly.

“…Fair.” I massaged my temples and didn’t say, Some of you were programmed to have a specific personality core by developers of a different species, too.

Connla said, “But where’s the line between rightminding and brainwashing? Or, in the case of an AI, programming for adequate social controls versus creating slave intelligences?”

“It’s not late enough at night and I’m not drunk enough for this conversation,” I said.

“We can print you some intoxicants,” Connla said.

“Night is a null concept under these conditions,” Singer said.

I considered throwing a cat at him. If he had had a locus persona, I might have.

He continued, “It’s true. I was created by my team of parent AIs and human programmers from a menu of adaptations. They wanted me to be curious and outgoing and not take things at face value. To investigate and theorize.” I could almost hear the face he would have been pulling if he had a face to pull faces with. “They also had a remit from the sponsors, of course.”

Given the debt payments we were still making to keep Singer out of hock, I was pretty aware of that. But Singer figured out early that meat-minds require a fair amount of repetition, and he’s scrupulous about providing it. He’s still better than a lot of AIs, really, being more socially aware. Some of them exist on the tell-you-three-times rule, and let me tell you three times, the reminder algorithms they use on us poor meatheads aren’t that varied or subtle.

“They got their money’s worth,” I said, and through the shared ship sensorium, I felt Singer beaming.

“That reminds me,” he said. “Something doesn’t make sense to me about the not-a-parasite.”

“Only one thing?”

“What the hell was the booby trap doing there? And what was it for? It doesn’t make any sense.”

I had something clever on the tip of my tongue, but it never got said. Bantering with Singer and Connla was recreation on these long trips. But I faltered, and considered, and after a little while I said, “I hadn’t thought about that.”

The sparkles outlined my nailbeds as I studied the back of my hand, gleaming with kaleidoscopic light. Singer waited me out, so eventually I prompted, “You have a theory, though?”

Of course he did. To his credit, he managed not to sound smug as he said, “It makes sense to theorize that it wasn’t intended as a booby trap. But to protect the person who triggered the blow.”

“Right,” I said. “Of course. The pirates had an inside being. Somebody in the crew of the factory ship who made those modifications, triggered the blow, and hopefully survived to be picked up by the pirate ship. The parasite heals, and gives you a sense of direction in space, and that needle was designed to go through a standard-issue space suit and seal up the hole it left behind itself. So the inside alien installs and flips the switch their pirate contacts have given them, gets jabbed and blown into space with everybody else—but they’re wearing a suit. And they trigger their beacon and get picked up, parasite and all?”

“I’d need a little extra protection to be willing to risk that,” Connla said. “That’s the kind of crazy motherfucker you don’t mess with, somebody who would do something like that. Never mind that the ship was in a bubble when it happened.”

“Safer than a fight against a whole ship’s complement, probably,” I said. “And the crew of a ship doing something as illegal as rendering down Ativahikas would be armed, wouldn’t it?”

“Why not inject yourself with the parasite first, and then push the button?” Singer asked.

I gazed in the direction of his central core. “You’ve met engineers.”

Singer sighed.

“Still,” Connla said softly.

“Yeah,” I answered. “Still.”

I didn’t mention my ongoing curiosity about where they’d obtained the Koregoi senso in the first place, let alone learned to use it. Or my realization that it meant the pirates had at least one person who could do the same space-time surfing tricks I apparently could.

Was that the presence I had sensed?

Probably, they had more than one such person. Because if you had some ancient alien nanotech symbiote that would let you feel your way around the dark-matter lattices of the universe, you’d probably want to share it with all the people you trusted. As long as there weren’t unknown terrible side effects to being infected with alien space plague, I mean. I was sorry Connla hadn’t wound up with it; as pilot, he would have been able to react faster if he weren’t surfing my senso to read the gravity map.

I wondered if it had come off the factory ship, and was somehow related to the artificial gravity. I hoped the pirates didn’t have the means, or didn’t care enough, to try to track us with it. The mythical Admiral might have been able to do it, but the Admiral had the advantage of being a tall tale, which gave her the power to do whatever was narratively interesting. Folding space with an Alcubierre-White drive leaves enough eddies in the space-time continuum that I could feel them pretty clearly, and I was really new at this stuff.

Go the other way, I thought, and comforted myself that they’d want to hang on to their prize, not chase some random space tug across the galaxy.

The thing about Ativahikas is not that they’re giant, or sapient, or weirdly gorgeous, though they are all of those things. When they haven’t been horribly butchered, they look a bit like a Terran leafy sea dragon, or those motile sentient sea-trees from Desireninex. They’re seaweedy and ragged and layered in fringe like the dress of a medieval queen, and their symbiotic algae turns them into a shifting, iridescent play of brilliant shades of indigo, cobalt, teal, and jade and emerald greens. And the reason people kill them is not for any intrinsic quality of their own—it’s for those algae. Or the metabolic byproducts thereof.

Certain more complex and nuanced combinations of organics are, as I mentioned before, hard to synthesize and print in exactly the right harmonies. You can make a burger that tastes like umami and salt, sure—that’s not terribly difficult. Coffee that tastes like coffee is, at the current state of the art, impossible, and chocolate or vanilla that actually taste like chocolate or vanilla… Well, Terra has a healthy luxury export market in those.

Likewise, devashare.

Easy enough to synthesize, get you high as hell. If your existence is unbearable, it helps relieve the misery. Most people don’t even know, I suppose, that the drug was originally isolated from compounds derived from Ativahika symbiotes. But—from what the connoisseurs tell me, I wouldn’t know myself—the synthetic stuff bears the same relationship to the harvested as pot-still white lightning does to a good aged whiskey. Which is to say, it gets the job done, as long as getting your head blasted open is the only job you care about doing.

I spent a little bit of time using the synthetic stuff pretty heavily after I left my clade. A lot of people who go through that kind of transition do. You manage to disentangle yourself, but then you’re out in the hard, cold universe and suddenly everybody is disagreeing with you—and you have no idea how to manage disagreement and how awful it makes you feel, having never experienced it at all.

And I had a traumatic relationship to recover from, which I was still blaming myself for. But of course that’s what people leaving one kind of damaging situation do—they find another one, slightly different in some aspects, and they try to exert control over it. Even more disagreement to manage, and a lot of blame. From a lot of directions.

Devashare is great for that. Better than THC, or alcohol.

Eventually, I realized that I was wasting my time, and if I wanted to hide from humanity in a bottle, I was better off making it a titanium one with a warp drive and a couple of carefully selected companions. I got over my clade-reaction issues with neurochemical control enough to seek professional chemical stabilization, and I used my clade-trained engineering background and aptitude to get into a tech program and Made Something of Myself.

These diar, I get a lot more reading done.

Synthetic devashare isn’t expensive. You can print it from readily available components, if you are someplace with a permissive substance policy. But the good stuff—the nightmare stuff—that’s not the sort of thing that you can get just anywhere. It’s virulently illegal everywhere with a government, as you’d hope any intoxicant rendered from the murdered flesh of presumed sentients would be. So it’s the sort of thing you hear rumors about the wealthy and dissolute obtaining, or trying to obtain—the same way you hear rumors about certain debauched privileged types throwing noncon kink parties and similar nasty things.

There are people, even now, who manage to elude rightminding to the point where they enjoy their pleasures more if somebody else suffers to provide them.

Two decians later, we didn’t have any answers, but we’d all kind of gotten used to having the not-a-parasite around. And we were still calling it the not-a-parasite, even though it had proven pretty useful.

We’d moved on, in most of our intramural discussions about The One That Got Away, to mourning our loss of the gravity tech and theorizing extensively about its origins and whether or not the pirates were more interested in that or in the results of the factory ship’s abominable business. We hadn’t come to any conclusions on that front, either—but at least the conversation, as a sport, had served to see us home. (Home, in this case, being a relative term meaning “At least technically close enough to an inhabited system to beg for help and hope we might be heard.”)

A faint shudder ran through the ship as we dropped out of white space and into reality. My sensorium flickered and resolved, matching what appeared in the forward port—stars, a glaring sun, the frame of a gate marker placed in a Lagrangian point so ships already maneuvering through the system could avoid collisions with ships dropping out of white space. We’d come in neat, but hot. Really hot, despite everything.

Hot, and nearly out of fuel.

“Singer,” I said, “can you compute a docking trajectory, please?”

“I can,” the AI answered in his usual mellifluous tones. (“When you can sound like anything you like, why not sound like something pleasant?”) “But are you sure you really want to go over there?”

He was teasing, of course. See above, nearly out of fuel—though I think none of us was really sanguine about the trade opportunities available in this slightly dodgy backend of nowhere.

“We could use an air exchange,” Connla said reasonably. “I know it’s not a concern for you. But we apes do like our oxygen.”

We were moving fast, but at least we were within lightspeed communication range that wasn’t longer than a human lifetime. So I got on the horn and sent out a personally voiced feeler and a request for help. Sometimes it helps to remind them you’re not a drone.

“This is a salvage tug, Terran space ship registry number 657-2929-04, inbound with Pilot Connla Kuruscz, Engineer Haimey Dz, a shipmind, and two nonsentient pets aboard. We request braking assistance, and—”

“No docking assistance,” Singer said.

“Over,” I said, and dropped the transmit. “No dock?”

“I don’t want to owe them any more than we have to,” Connla said, suddenly serious. “Singer and I can handle it.”

As we decelerated, he and I both drifted into contact with the couches we had previously been belted to, but had to all intents and purposes just been floating beside. The cats were already snug in their cushioned accel pods, despite Mephistopheles’s protests. Bushyasta might have woken up when we netted her in? I’m not sure.

I sweated. Weight began to press on my legs and arms.

“Salvage tug registry number 657-2929-04, Kuruscz and Dz, braking assistance, confirmed, over,” a voice came back.

I lifted my hands against the uncomfortable pull of acceleration to indicate to Connla that I released negotiations—and the ship—into his and Singer’s command.

Funny story, but the coincidence of our last names ending in the same letter is what led two such disparate types as Connla and myself to meet and team up in the first place. It’s a long story involving being sorted onto the same team for a pub quiz.

We used to call ourselves Team Zed. It sort of fell out of use after we had built up a decan of better reasons to feel like a family, but it still gets a wink and a grin every once in a while.

This was not going to be one of those times. The tense line of his shoulders, with no reason I knew of for it, made me wonder if he’d been arguing more than recreationally with Singer.

Well, one of the things you learn about sharing a small space with strong personalities you can’t escape from is to practice your boundaries even if you’ll never be really good at them. If it was any of my business, somebody would tell me about it eventually.

I sensoed the system tugs coming up alongside.

Alcubierre-White ships coming in hot is a not-uncommon occurrence, and I wasn’t worried. Nothing in space is ever really standing still, so all vectors and accelerations are, not to put too fine a point on it, relative. Our goal wasn’t so much to slow down, exactly, because a station in orbit around a primary is whipping along at a pretty good pace, depending on the season, the ellipticality of the orbit, and the size of the star and the station’s distance from it. Also on whether it’s parked in a Lagrangian point, or in a secondary orbit around a world or satellite—in some smaller and older systems, there’s only one station, and the spaceport is actually attached to the platform at the top of the El. It’s convenient for trucking, because stuff can go up and down the line out of the local well and straight onto transport without having to be bussed around locally first.

But having all your eggs in one basket like that would make me nervous, if I were a groundhugger. What happens if the El comes down, and takes the spaceport with it, and there’s no way for disaster relief, even, to get insystem except for pod drops or some such primitive travesty? I mean, okay, if a skyhook fell on your head you would have real problems anyway—climate change, punctuated equilibrium, global-catastrophe existential-level problems.

But not being able to get water and toilet paper wouldn’t help with those.

Anyway, Downthehatch wasn’t one of those, thank Albert. I watched the tugs—drone tugs, operated by shipminds with limited processing allotments, poor things—match v with us. They didn’t have pilots, so they didn’t worry too much about pulling gs. It seemed as if we were rapidly overtaking them, but before we came in between them they punched it. We crawled into position and they matched us, then hung beside us port and starboard as unmoving as if we were all welded together.

Having matched us, they grappled us, and started the burn to drag us down.

The EM drive, which we used for slow maneuvering, didn’t burn anything—but it couldn’t brake or accelerate us as fast as the AWD. We wouldn’t run out of fuel, using the EM drive, but if we hadn’t been able to yell for help from the tugs, we would have been a long fifty ans or so dropping our v and coming back around to meet the station.

I watched nervously, tracking the fuel used as their burn turned us, then slowed us to something closer to maneuvering speed.

We were still moving faster relative to the station than I was comfortable with when Singer hit the release and I floated off my couch. We were no longer changing v.

“We have to validate for the fuel anyway,” I said.

They both ignored me.

The station was not yet in sight ahead, and we had plenty of time to kill before we caught up with it. Of course this meant that Singer and Connla started arguing about the nature of consciousness again. (I’m sorry, “discussing.” Connla tells me that being clade-bred, I think spirited discussions are arguments long before there’s any arguing going on.)

I tuned them out for a while and looked around for the local primary. It was bright yellow, and off to the left.

When I tuned back in, Singer was ending a paragraph by asking, “By those standards, am I a real intelligence? Am I just a sufficiently complicated and randomized construct that I adequately simulate an intelligence? Or am I just a mock-up?”

“Aw,” I said. “You’re ghost in the machine enough for me, Singer.”

“You could ask the same thing of me,” Connla replied, more infinitely amused than infinitely patient with the existential crises of inanimate objects. “Most human philosophy for as long as human philosophy has been recorded seems to be concerned with pretty much the same question. If free will is an illusion, do I exist? Or do I merely think I exist?”

I sighed. “Is there any functional difference?”

“Is that the worm Ouroboros eating his tail I see?”

“You bumped your psychopathy up, didn’t you?”

He smiled generously. “Of course I did. I’m flying. Can’t be distracted by doubts.”

His hands moved over the screens, gently and flawlessly stroking transparent display and contact surfaces. Singer could do it all, of course—and would, when it came to the incredibly delicate work of matching velocities with the station—but there was some pleasure to be had in manual control while it was possible.

“I feel like it’s a more pressing question for me,” Singer said. “I’m nothing but those electrical signals.”

“Are you suggesting I’m something more?” I replied. “Did you get us those docking permissions?”

“You have flesh.”

“Sure, and my consciousness seems to be an emergent property of that flesh. It’s shaped by the flesh; it can be modified by modifying the meat. At least I can move you into a new mem and you take up right where you left off. Maybe a little smarter. We can model a human brain, even duplicate one—”

“Well, duplicate might not be the right term,” Connla said. “Duplicate my brain, shove me into a digester, and I’m still dead methane keeping the electricity on. Maybe if you mapped all the meat and then engineered identical meat with identical chemicals you’d get an identical mind, but then you still have the problem of your mind being stuck in meat. Which is what most of the upload guys are trying to avoid.”

“You’re making my point for me, interrupting lad.”

The ship shuddered with a brief burn. The arc of a structure swung across the forward screen—swirling, stately.

“This is wildly antisocial!” I said.

“Sorry,” Connla said.

He didn’t look sorry. He winked.

“It’s like systems of government,” Singer said suddenly as he completed his swing and burned again to arrest the movement.

“Here we go again.”

“It’s why I want us to be very careful what we commit to while we’re dealing with this station. They make bad governmental choices, and by patronizing them, we’re just validating their choices.”

“We still need fuel and supplies. We need new chow,” Connla said reasonably. “And air that doesn’t smell like the garlic in last week’s soup.”

I braced myself. I suppose when you’re functionally immortal, think at the speed of light, and your multitasking ability is only limited by the number of parallel processor arrays you can line up, you need a lot of hobbies.

Singer said, “Government is either imposed with force, or it derives from the will of the governed. But it’s a social contract, right? It exists simply because people say it does. It’s not a thing you can touch.”

“Neither is consciousness,” Connla said.

“You’re encouraging him,” I said. “Fly the tug, so we don’t die.”

“My point exactly!” Singer continued. “It’s like… language. Or an economy. It’s a consensus model, not an objective reality.”

“There’s a whole body of theory and a not-insignificant pile of myth that insists that language actually does have some kind of objective reality,” Connla said. “But we’ll let that slide for now. Are you going someplace interesting with this?”

The superstructure sighed as the AI’s feather touch adjusted our trajectory toward the dock. The great wheel of the station grew, and morphed slowly into an arc, clipped at the edges by the frame of the forward window.

“I’m hurt,” Singer said, “by the implication that I might be going someplace uninteresting.”

“Supernovae and small fishes,” I muttered. “Aren’t we still coming in a little hot?”

“Don’t you trust me?” Singer said. “We work together because we agree to. Because we see that collective bargain, that social contract, as advantageous to all of us. I work with you because the work interests me. Because I enjoy traveling with you. Because the rewards of salvage and exploration are generally intellectually stimulating.”

“Because we put up with your lectures.”

“I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that, Haimey.”

“Because the salvage helps pay off your obligation,” Connla offered.

I said, “Aren’t we still coming in a little hot?”

“You work with me because of my skills, and also my companionship. Although your perversity forces you to suggest otherwise.”

“My perversity currently forces me to ask if you shouldn’t be taking this emergency decel upon which all our lives depend a little more seriously.”

“I am capable of multitasking,” Singer scoffed.

We bent on an arc with another burn, moving parallel to the station’s axis of rotation now. The dock was coming up fast, relative motion sharp and quick, and the fuel gauge was on empty and not even flickering when we shifted v. I knew Singer was in contact with the station’s AI because of the ripple of lights across the console that allowed us slowbrains to monitor his resource allocation.

I hoped the station wasn’t screaming at us to slow down. I waited to feel heavy again, but I kept just floating above my couch.

Well, if we got hit for it, I’d take the fine out of Singer’s share. If we plowed into the airlock at velocity… we’d have bigger problems than a speeding ticket.

And so would the station.

“Oh, Void,” I said as we came around the curve. “That’s the pirate ship.”

There she was, big as life, docked and quiescent. We whipped past her so fast she looked like a white blur. I couldn’t see any weapons on her, but we were moving pretty fast and perhaps they retracted into their ports when she was trying to look like she wasn’t a corsair. I started to doubt my pattern recognition just as Singer said, “Confirmed.”

Cold settled into my gut. “How did they track us here? How did they get here ahead of us?”

Connla said, “Maybe they were coming here anyway.”

I sucked my teeth. “Well, that’s rotten luck.”

Singer, calmly, commented, “We have to dock.”

“They fired on us.”

Singer said, “You have a better plan?”

Connla added, “One that doesn’t involve freezing to death in the Big Empty?”

I didn’t. And yeah, my shipmate definitely had his sophipathology pumped right up.

“Maybe they didn’t see us,” Connla added.

Maybe.

We whipped around the station again, and the ship did look quiet. Downthehatch wasn’t a big station—thirty thousand people at most—but that was enough to get lost in.

Maybe it would be okay. And—I looked at the fuel readout again—it wasn’t as if we had a lot of choices.

“Authority derives from the consent of the governed, is what I’m saying,” Singer continued, as if we hadn’t been derailed by the threat of people with guns and a grudge. “And that consent is derived from consensus. Which is never universal.”

“Somebody always feels like they’re getting screwed,” Connla clarified.

“That’s business,” I agreed, picking at my cuticle.

Connla glared at me, and I felt the weight of Singer’s disapproval in the flicker of his status lights. They could be as expressive as a frown.

“What?” I said. “I was agreeing with you. You say consent is never universal, but remember—I grew up in a clade. Where consensus is perfect, and enforced. I ran away. I’m allergic to perfect consensus. It has to be enforced somehow, and once you sign the clade contract, they just tune your neurology until you agree. Boom, no conflict.”

“But government,” Singer said. “Government is a social contract. It has no objective existence. It’s a thing human beings made up. The good ones allow for the allocation of present resources in a manner that meets present needs, including those of the most vulnerable, which requires a certain amount of altruism and also foresight in those who do not currently need assistance that somedia they are likely to. Which is why”—he sighed—“I have to turn myself in and serve my time for the Core, helping to run things.”

“It all takes a lack of denial, too,” I said. “Which is the hard part. We’re still hot. Please acknowledge.”

“Acknowledging,” Singer answered. “We’re hot. I’m on it.”

I could have mentioned that it was rightminding which made that basic level of altruism possible; that we were hierarchal creatures with a tendency toward magical and unrealistic thinking, left to our own devices. That evolution had left us with a number of sophipathologies intrinsic to our intellectual makeup, and that to survive as a society we intervened in those failures to grasp reality in order to make our people, in general, more amenable to working for a commonweal.

Clade Light, really.

One of the things the Freeporters objected to.

Singer said, “These people made up a bad government. It’s imposed, not emergent. You won’t like it.”

“Clades are imposed.” We still had time to kill. That’s the problem with space: even scary things can take a really long time to happen. “Rightminding is imposed.”

“There’s agreeing to live by the obligations and laws of a civilization in order to enjoy its common protections, and then there’s having obligations and laws forced upon you.”

“I’m not going to move here,” I said. “Just eat something with fresh spices in it. Besides, Downthehatch is a Synarche system. It can’t be that tyrannical. And if we had a choice about coming here, we wouldn’t be. Especially with a pirate ship in dock.”

“They might as well be Republic pirates,” Connla teased.

“They might as well be,” Singer agreed darkly. Which seemed a little on-the-nose, given that there was, in fact, a pirate ship in dock.

We were spiraling close to the station. Close enough that I wished they would stop arguing and fly the damn tug. I wondered what we looked like coming in, with our scorched and empty derrick housings and our hastily patched hull.

I hoped—again—that the pirates weren’t looking.

“We’re going to have to report the pirates,” Singer said unhappily. “To a stationmaster who is giving them berth space.”

Maybe the stationmaster doesn’t know, I almost said, and swallowed it. One of the problems with AIs grown from personality seeds is that sometimes they’re just as reactive and weird as any human. Singer was acting out because he was worried.

Of course the stationmaster knew. Which meant we needed to find another way to make sure the information made it back to the Core.

Singer feathered his engines. The ship luffed, hesitated, glided. Nudged the docking ring and—relative to the station—stopped. Singer caught the hook and—elegant, perfect, seamless, with no sense of acceleration—the station appeared to stop rotating, and the sun beneath the ship began to whirl instead. A locking click reverberated through the hull, followed by the hiss of exchanging atmosphere.

I worked my jaw as my ears popped painfully. My body, suddenly, weighed a ton. It was only quarter gravity, but it felt like somebody had tied sacks of bolts and washers to all of my limbs.

“Your fresh air, Connla,” Singer said dryly. “Enjoy breathing it in freedom for as long as you can. I’ll be arguing with the local arm of the Synarche for an extension on my service start date. Hopefully I’ll still be here when you return.”

I looked down at my star-webbed hands. We could make it home without Singer; flying an established space lane wasn’t hard, not for a pilot as good as Connla. I wouldn’t trust any expert system we found out here in the margins, anyway.

“Nanocream,” I asked out loud. “Do we have any?”

Singer said, “I can fab you some. There was a bit ready-made in first aid stores, but I’m afraid it’s expired.”

I smeared the stuff on, watched it color-match my skin. It looked mostly okay, but it was missing the subtle shadings of red-brown and cocoa that my natural complexion had, the centimeter-by-centimeter color variation.

I looked flat. A little plastic.

Ill. Or like an android.

Well, no offense to any androids, but that was about how I felt, as well.