Ancestral Night

by Elizabeth Bear

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 pas
t 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.

  CHAPTER 7

  SHALL I COMPARE THEE TO a docking ring? Thou art more beautiful and more temperate, though that’s not really hard when you’re talking about an airlock whose external temperature is measured on the low end of kelvins. On the other hand, I’m not sure I could have been happier with anything or felt more raw, unfettered love than I did for that docking ring, right then. Free and with my afthands on metal, I stretched against the rotational acceleration and sighed.

  I love Singer; don’t get me wrong. I wouldn’t trade my life for any crowded station existence, and most definitely not for anything on the downside. How do people live down wells? But it was good to get away from him and Connla—for just a few hours. There’s nothing like being annoyed by different sentiences to make you really appreciate your own.

  Not that Downthehatch Station had a lot to recommend it. The ox section smelled of chlorine, strong enough to smart in my sinuses. The chlorine section probably stank of oxygen, I was willing to bet, because nothing makes two mutually bioincompatible life-forms feel more relaxed and at home than breathing trace quantities of each other’s poison.

  Some stations, you walk out of the docking ring—okay, you climb up through it, usually, though on this one we had docked alongside the axis of spin, which is not as sturdy a connection but you don’t have to go up a ladder to get out—and there are restaur
ants, nightlife, trade shops, and tourist attractions. Showers and brothels and the usual amenities of any port.

  On some others, you’re lucky if there’s a bathroom.

  This was one of the latter. Not even a dive bar in sight, just a long dingy curve of corridor with fibrous gray carpeting institutionalizing it further. It had windows, at least, and as I looked to my left I had the rare pleasure of a glimpse of Singer from the outside, visible through the ports. Chalk another small human convenience up to side-by-side docking.

  I pulled my screen out of my pocket and checked directions to the stationmaster’s office. Technically we did not have to present in person, having received clearances—but there was the little matter of the criminal issues to report, and the social capital therefrom to negotiate. Connla and I had drawn lots, and it had fallen to me to deal with strangers.

  Again.

  I’m pretty sure he cheats. Especially since, as I was pulling my station shoes on to cushion my poor afthands, he had smiled cheerily and said, “It’ll be good for you to get out and meet some people!”

  Then he had announced his intention to go find the local strategy games club and see if he could get laid, find a chess partner, or both. So yeah, I’m pretty sure he cheats. I had sighed, and reminded him to turn his conscience and risk-assessment back on, and told Singer not to print him any station shoes unless he did.

  I can cheat too, on occasion.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  The connecting corridor from the docking ring spiraled me into a main hallway after a dozen steps or so, coming in from the side to make it easy to merge with the flow of traffic. This was where all the people were. A diverse group—I spotted a lot of humans, some of whom side-eyed me just enough to let me know they’d spotted the nanoskin and wondered if I was an overly made-up human or an AI out for a stroll.

  There’s always somebody who feels like they have the right to judge.

  But there was also a selection of other ox-type systers, including some small furry ones, some caterpillar-like ones, a couple of examples of a photosynthetic species that were particularly welcome on stations because they respirated using carbon dioxide, and one member of an elephantine, red-skinned species whose name was unpronounceable to Terrans. We called them Thunderbys, and this one’s hulking frame strained the capacity of the corridor.