Ancestral Night

by Elizabeth Bear

  Thank you for downloading this Simon & Schuster ebook.

  * * *

  Get a FREE ebook when you join our mailing list. Plus, get updates on new releases, deals, recommended reads, and more from Simon & Schuster. Click below to sign up and see terms and conditions.

  CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP

  Already a subscriber? Provide your email again so we can register this ebook and send you more of what you like to read. You will continue to receive exclusive offers in your inbox.

  Publisher’s Notice

  The publisher has provided this ebook to you without Digital Rights Management (DRM) software applied so that you can enjoy reading it on your personal devices. This ebook is for your personal use only. You may not print or post this ebook, or make this ebook publicly available in any way. You may not copy, reproduce, or upload this ebook except to read it on your personal devices.

  Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this ebook you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: simonandschuster.biz/online_piracy_report.

  This book is for Jon Singer.

  LOW-TIDE

  THESE wet rocks where the tide has been,

  Barnacled white and weeded brown

  And slimed beneath to a beautiful green,

  These wet rocks where the tide went down

  Will show again when the tide is high

  Faint and perilous, far from shore,

  No place to dream, but a place to die,—

  The bottom of the sea once more.

  There was a child that wandered through

  A giant’s empty house all day,—

  House full of wonderful things and new,

  But no fit place for a child to play.

  —Edna St. Vincent Millay, 1921

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Think of ancestral night that can,

  If but imagination scorn the earth

  And intellect is wandering

  To this and that and t’other thing,

  Deliver from the crime of death and birth.

  —W. B. Yeats, from “The Winding Stair,” 1933

  CHAPTER 1

  THE BOAT DIDN’T HAVE A name.

  He wasn’t deemed significant enough to need a name by the authorities and registries that govern such things. He had a registration number—657-2929-04, Human/Terra—and he had a class, salvage tug, but he didn’t have a name.

  Officially.

  We called him Singer. If Singer had an opinion on the issue, he’d never registered it—but he never complained. Singer was the shipmind as well as the ship—or at least, he inhabited the ship’s virtual spaces the same way we inhabited the physical ones—but my partner Connla and I didn’t own him. You can’t own a sentience in civilized space.

  Singer was a sliver of a thing suspended electromagnetically at the center of a quicksilver loop as thin in cross section as an old-fashioned wedding band, but a hundred and fifty meters across the diameter and ten meters from edge to edge. In any meaningful gravity, the ring would have crumpled and sagged like a curl of wax arched over the candleflame. But here in space, reinforced with electromagnetic supports, it spanned the horizon of the viewport in a clean arc.

  I held on to a rail with one afthand, lazily comfortable as I watched the light sliding in Doppler-watered bands across the silver surface of the white coils. The concentrated colors of the ring moved across a background that looked like a dilute version of the same pattern, as the action of the white drive changed what would have been a gorgeous starfield into twisting blue and red light that glided like the colors on heated titanium.

  Those ripples of light were messages written in physics and perception. The information they offered would have seemed cryptic to most people. They would have seemed cryptic to me, twenty ans ago when I was but a wee slip of a person freshly skinned out and free of the clade I grew up in, Nyumba Yangu Haina Mlango. But I had a lot of practice reading their frequency and patterns now. Singer was . . . well, slowing wasn’t exactly the right word, but it would do. We were, to coin a phrase, getting there.

  Singer couldn’t navigate in white space. He could only follow the course planned and programmed beforehand, coasting like a surfer on a wave of space contracting before him and stretching out behind. He—we—were not even, technically speaking, moving, let alone moving particularly fast. The universe was just rearranging itself around us, invisible to those outside the bubble of the white field.

  Soon we would fold ourselves out of white space and into the normal universe. We were looking for a scar in space-time, the tiny ripple of radiation left by the passage of a ship whose course hadn’t been tracked by any authority, and so when it had been lost, its loss had gone unnoticed for—well, nobody could actually say how long. We were going there on purpose, and we planned to stay a while. Because somewhere down that Alcubierre-White rabbit hole in space-time there was—or at least had been—a ship. A lost ship.

  A misplaced one, anyway. We’d taken on obligation for an information broker who provided us with scans and imaging they’d obtained from the captain who had noticed the anomaly. They’d also provided the anomaly’s coordinates.

  The coordinates we’d bid on were off the beaten path, perpendicular by a good distance from the inhabited and regularly traveled space lanes of the Milky Way. But we’d been out this far before, and space was vast. Ships still got lost now and then, but they were usually better tracked these diar, and in the centuries since the white drive had turned space from an empty, intractable void permeated by loneliness and existential dread into a teeming, boisterous, and mostly peaceful community of species . . . much of the older salvage in the plane of the Milky Way had been picked clean.

  Bright ripples across the darkness narrowed, sharpened, resolved into bands, then blurs, then points of light. We fell into normal space and began to close the gap on our EMP engines. Through Singer’s senso, I got a feel for the scar.

  It was a big one, and it looked fresh, which meant that the odds of the unlucky vessel that had caused it still being in there were pretty good. That would be nice, because our last two claims had come up empty, and the larder was a little bare. We hadn’t even gotten any wreck-driving tourist contracts recently, which were risky—especially the ones involving close approach to an event horizon—but secretly a lot of fun.

  Connla liked them even more than I did.

  “I wish I knew what the ship that found this thing was doing way the hell out here. There’s literally nothing for light-ans in any direction.” Connla, speaking to me through senso. He was up in the control cabin. It was supposed to be my rest shift. Sometimes, despite all the rightminding I can tolerate, I still have nightmares.

  I answered, “If I had a nasty, suspicious mind . . .”

  “Yeah,” Connla said. “Pirates. Me too.”

  “You know they don’t like being called pirates,” Singer joked.

  “Freeloaders.” Connla came from a world called Spartacus, notorious for its atavistic culture. One reason it was that way was because it sat so close to Freeport strongholds. Border brushfires and the constant threat of raids and one’s shipping being picked off contributed to a martial culture. And I wasn’t supposed to know this, but Connla had survived a pirate raid on an asteroid settlement when he was a child.

  I frowned at the scar. Singer’s senses were designed for space, and his readouts told me that the scar was fresh. If there was a ship in there, and it was intact, and we could bring it home—depending on what it was—this whole trip would be worthwhile. We had an obligation to the Synarche that needed to be met, one way or another. We were spending resources to be here; resources the Synarche would want recouped and, ideally, built upon. The pr
ize ship and its cargo were where that replacement value would come from.

  “It’ll be a smuggler,” Connla said dourly.

  A bad outcome for our obligation if it was. Contraband was illegal goods or stolen art. Everything else a civilized galactic Synarche required was so easy to make, or ship, that there was no percentage in dodging around customs. If they were smuggling art, there might be forgiven obligations for recovering lost cultural treasures.

  There also might not.

  A pirate would be even more useless to us, beyond any value there might be in the hull. Some find the Galactic Synarche suffocating. And I have a healthy sympathy for the whole avoiding-suffocation thing. But there’s asserting a reasonable individuality in the face of social norms, and then there’s piracy and murder as an economic model.

  A hull could bring us some recovery credit. If it were in decent shape. Which pirate ships rarely were. But it wouldn’t get us much else, because any cargo would likely be resources that, while valuable to those of us living in space within the Synarche, weren’t valuable enough to go ferreting around in space-time pockets after.

  “Maybe it’ll be a Wake-Seeker,” I sent, cheerfully. Those who followed the Path of the Unfinished Work were always grateful for news of the fate of missing brethren. Even if, as they say, the authentic experience is an illusion.

  We were both really hoping that we might find a passenger vessel, commercial or private, that had wandered off course and gotten lost with no one the wiser as to its location. Those often offered finder’s credit in the form of resource allocation validations to the salvager who retrieved them, both from the shipping line, the owners of registry of any cargo, and the families or clades of any passengers. And if there was unregistered cargo, that could be value along with the hull.

  Best of all were the packet vessels, which were full of information. And the ancient prizes from early exploration—by any race—that were treasure troves of archaeological data. That would be worth a few RAVs above the cost of the mission.

  I didn’t even bother to consider the possibility that the hulk could be an ancient ship from a time long before that remembered by humans, or even any of the older syster species. I’d heard about Koregoi ships with salvageable tech. I’d never encountered one. Or even encountered anyone who admitted they had. But wouldn’t it be nice . . . ?

  Well, that wouldn’t be behind a fresh scar, anyway. So honestly I was just black-sky diadreaming, indulging myself in fantasies of untold wealth. Or of at least buying Singer out of copyright so he would own his own code.

  I was still on edge, and now it was too close to contact for me to bump my chems and get any restful sleep. Growing up clade—and a flirtation with chemical dependency after I broke free—had left me wary of the easy out, anyway, so I rarely thought of fixing the problem at the transmitter level when it was possible for me to ride it out.

  When I remembered, or Singer nagged me into it, I always wondered why I hadn’t bumped earlier. Why I’d been so resistant in the first place. And except for a few permanent mental health adjustments, I always insisted on a limited adjustment that would wear off in half a dia or so.

  Well, if people made sense, we’d be like Singer.

  I turned away from the port. There would be a distraction of some sort in the command cabin, and I could caffeinate. Or bump, and tune for wakefulness since I’d missed the shuttle on rest.

  I slid down the tunnel to the bridge headfirst, pushing off rungs in the tube with my fore- and afthands, avoiding bruising the lettuce and radishes growing along Singer’s living walls. The ship’s calico cats, Mephistopheles and Bushyasta, were floating in the tube, napping in a cuddle. Bushyasta, like the professional sleeper she was, had one set of claws hooked into the terry cloth of a grab loop. Mephistopheles was floating beside her, a red-and-white leg draped for an anchor over Bushyasta’s belly, her black-splashed head cuddled on a mottled flank. Well, at least somebody was getting some rest around here.

  I glided the last meter or so—it wasn’t far: Singer really was a tiny bubble of a thing for frail warm meat to take to space in—and found myself gazing at the back of Connla’s head.

  He’d anchored himself to a rail with his afthands, and his forehands were buried elbow-deep in the stuff of his console. His ponytail waved lazily behind him as he turned his head. I caught a glimpse of stubborn profile outlined against starfield and suppressed a smile.

  He started to say something, coughed, and corrected himself. “Wouldn’t sleep?”

  I could have argued—couldn’t—but I knew my unwillingness to tune my chem was opaque to Connla on an emotional level even when he professed to understand it intellectually. I thought he’d actually maybe mellow and mature a bit if he didn’t bump and tune so much to keep his responses calmed down to Spartacus’s stoic ideals. On the other hand, I’d have to put up with him finally experiencing adolescence, and that whole thing was such a mess I’d turned mine off when it happened. Well, okay, a little bit after it happened. Some people have to learn the hard way, and apparently I am one of them.

  It was his brain and his chem and his business, so I just said, “We should have pulled a permit.”

  “And let every other tug in the galaxy know where we were headed?”

  “And have a chance of a rescue operation if we screw it up.” I settled near my console, floating with one afthand resting lightly against a rail, and watched out the forward windows as ripples of light gathered and spread.

  Connla laughed. “You put on such a rebel act, but I keep hearing your crèche talking out of your mouth again and again. Anybody raised outside of a clade knows that it’s easier to get forgiveness than permission. Besides, a permit isn’t strictly legally necessary all the way out here. We’re not in anybody’s jurisdiction.”

  He was transparent when he was baiting me. His own upbringing had left a few antisocial marks on him, but try to get him to admit that. If he hadn’t been such a good guy from the DNA on up, he would have been insufferable. And quite possibly socially dangerous.

  “Forgiveness is not the same thing as retroactive consent, Connla. And the research shows that people are much more altruistic when they’re allowed to offer, instead of when something is demanded of them. There will be more red tape on the other end, this way.” He didn’t answer, so I said, “How much longer?”

  “Ninety-seven seconds to the decel.”

  My console felt cool and ready when I touched its carbonglas surface with my fingertips, just enough to stabilize, balance, and get a spherical perspective. I didn’t bury my hands in my console the way Connla had, but I wasn’t flying the bus.

  Well, okay, Singer was flying the bus. But Connla was directing, and he needed to be plugged in to Singer’s full senso.

  A wide arc of stars swung below and behind Singer like the frozen skirts of a flamenco dancer: the Milky Way, seen from . . . not exactly outside, but far to one edge, and an angle. Scuttling fingers tap-danced up my spine at the sight of home, so far away. Which was ridiculous, because it wasn’t home to me—Singer was. And we were in no more danger here than anywhere else in space. Maybe even a little less than if we were camped in some cluttered, long-inhabited system full of meteors, traffic that couldn’t follow a flight plan, and poorly mapped space junk.

  It’s a territorial mammal thing, is all. There’s a sense of being long and far away from places you know your way around and have resources in that gets right up into the anxiety centers and made me feel lost and out of place.

  We were off our turf, and my amygdala knew it.

  Connla was cool and collected. I felt his calm through our link like a lapping sea. He didn’t look over at me to roll his eyes, a demonstration of self-control better than I’d have been able to manage. He’d didn’t have to tell me that he thought my resistance to tuning my mood was childish and irresponsible.

  But he hadn’t grown up in a clade. He hadn’t escaped a clade. And the hypervigilance was my friend. His friend, too,
if he’d ever admit it. Sure, it was uncomfortable. But that was a small price to pay for being ready. Getting caught by a disaster is bad enough. Getting caught by a disaster you didn’t expect adds that layer of humiliation and stunned goggle-eyed frozenness to the proceedings, and that doesn’t benefit you in the long run.

  All of those memories were stored in my fox, and I would have shared the ayatana with him if he’d given me half an excuse. But he had never gotten past his childhood programming that feelings were sticky and somehow slightly revolting. So it was an element of our friendship that remained unexplored.

  And thus my uneasy feeling could have just been my old friend Uneasy Feeling, dropping by to see how things were shaking. It could have been that territorial fear of not knowing where I was, and where to find food, shelter, water, and my tribe. But it never hurt to be on your guard.

  Yep. Sleeping with one eye open, that’s me. People only think it’s ridiculous if they’ve never been caught napping by an enemy. And the truth of the universe is that anybody can turn out to be an enemy.

  “Let’s keep the bubble up for now in case we have to move in a hurry,” I said.

  Connla didn’t argue. He cleared his throat and said, “Singer, are you awake?”

  “More awake than you are,” the ship replied. Most ships are she, for bigoted gender-essentialist historical reasons, and most of the rest see no reason to bother being gendered at all and call themselves they, but Singer liked a male identity.

  He hadn’t always been a tugboat, I gathered. He had a bantering manner, which was just code, but when it came right down to it I was just code too, running on some kludged-together hardware.

  He added, “What can I do for you?”

  Singer was smart as hell, a born problem-solver if you told him what problem to solve for and gave him some parameters that he could extrapolate. But artificial personalities were intentionally limited in their self-direction and agency, for reasons that will be obvious to a cursory inquiry.