Ancestral Night

by Elizabeth Bear

  Like most other people, I edged to one side to let it past, stepping into the embrasure of an eatery doorway. The proprietor, a human like me, gave me the veil eye when they realized I wasn’t coming in, but stopped short of actually shoving me back out into the Thunderby’s path, thus saving both of us embarrassment and me possible injury. The Thunderby was huddling already, trying to take up as little space as possible, which still amounted to all of it. Its manipulator appendages consisted of five tentacular appurtenances, which it had wrapped around its torso in an uncomfortable-looking show of courtesy so as to minimize its profile.

  Politeness counts the effort, or so one of my clademothers used to say.

  I frowned at it thoughtfully, but though the Thunderby was big enough to have been the species mainly crewing the factory ship, it was the wrong outline. I was pretty sure we were looking for something more or less bipedal and bilaterally symmetrical.

  Maybe Singer would get something useful out of the station database. That wasn’t my job this trip, anyway.

  One side of the corridor rose in a ramp to the next level, and—following color-coded signs for Station Admin—I rose with it, feeling the pull of rotational “gravity” ease as I ascended toward the station’s hub. That came with a new and peculiar sensation: a sort of stretching along the fibers of my skin. My integument—and the Koregoi senso—was reacting to the change in angular and rotational momentum as I rose. I could feel the station spinning, and the fine gradation in speed between my head and my feet. Normally, that would be too subtle to notice. I steadied myself against the wall until the sensation evened out.

  I thought of mentioning it to Connla, but Singer was monitoring my senso, and the fact that Connla had turned our immediate link off made me think he’d probably found his chess club and didn’t care to be bothered.

  I hoped he didn’t run into any pirates while he was there. But honestly, it wasn’t any riskier than huddling in the ship would have been. The pirates knew what our ship looked like. They had no idea who we were.

  The ramp merged me onto another busy corridor. This one was lined with nearly anonymous offices, some with transparent windows, rather than with shops and eateries.

  I applied my ID card and most scannable appendage to the sensor beside the door marked Stationmaster in thirty-seven languages and Standard Galactic Iconography Set Number 3. The Core had already updated to Set Number 8 by then, to give you an idea of how behind the times this backwater was.

  The door slid aside and I found myself in a little suite, uncomfortably warm and humid by human standards, lit with full-spectrum bulbs. Probably past what my species would consider full spectrum, honestly; my skin tingled with UV.

  Other than the temperature and water content of the air, the door debouched into a pleasant-enough little reception/waiting area with a series of padded tuffets for seating, those being the sort of things that almost any species that liked to sit could sit or rest upon without discomfort. I was the only sentient visibly present. I took a blue tuffet beside the half-wall, and waited.

  No more than a few minutes later, someone poked their head around the edge of the divider, and my suspicions were confirmed. The being wearing the stationmaster ID flash on their upper torso was bipedal, roughly humanoid in outline, but their integument was, from the front, an almost lusterless, smooth purple-black resembling rubber. They had a head, with four pretty normal eyes—by Terran standards—ranged around it, but the head was otherwise a fairly featureless egg. There were respiration slits between each of the eyes, and on the back of the body was a series of pollen-yellow bladders that lay flat in ranks on either side of the spine.

  They were a Ceeharen, a member of a symbiotic, photosynthetic syster species I’d noticed represented in the corridor. They made a pleasant susurrant moaning—which issued from the bladders along their cellulose spine, not from their respiration apparatus—and exhaled a welcoming cloud of oxygen into the room.

  Come in, my senso translated their speech. Be welcome. I am designated as [Colonel] [Habren] for these purposes. How may such a one as this assist such a one as you?

  I was glad the stationmaster wasn’t human. It limited the chance that they would find the makeup hiding the silver stuff all over my hands and face weird or suspicious. On the other hand, most interspecies advantages flow two ways. I didn’t have a damned idea what they were thinking, either.

  I followed Habren in, was seated on one of the ubiquitous tuffets, introduced myself by name and—by his registry number—as Singer’s engineer, and said, “I wanted to thank you personally for the braking assist.”

  Of course, Habren said. For humanitarian reasons if nothing else.

  They paused.

  There is the little matter of justifying your crew continuing to hold right of use to the salvage tug, as it seems the recent cost of your missions has dramatically exceeded their usefulness, and the tug appears damaged. Also there is the little matter of your shipmind’s selective service option having been called in. . . .

  “These things are true,” I told them. I steepled my fingers in my lap. “We have some nonmaterial salvage from this past trip that is significantly better than a prize vessel, however. I’d like to speak to the station Goodlaw about it. Do you have a border control vessel in port currently? Or within hailing distance?”

  We have a Goodlaw on the station, Habren said. They stretched under the full-spectrum light that bathed their desk. My butt was leaving a pair of hemispherical sweat stains on my tuffet, encouraged by the warmth and humidity, but my lungs and skin were basking in it. Something about that pose, straining—unconsciously?—toward the light, and their lack of access to a Justice vessel that would be more useful to an outpost like this than the constable they did have, made me think the Ceeharen was a little bitter about being exiled out here at the back of beyond. It was administering the kind of station that would never be anything but countless troubles, small and big, without the resources allocated to manage it properly. There was probably nothing the stationmaster could do to stop Freeporters from calling through here, even if they wanted to.

  So was it safe telling them what we’d found? Would they pass our identity and registry on to the captain of that Republic ship docked out there, willingly or under duress?

  “I would like to speak with the station Goodlaw,” I said. “We have information of significant value regarding piracy and other illegal acts. I think it should more than redeem our debt to society.”

  I see, said Habren.

  “I also need some information about a syster species.”

  Well, that should be possible, if we have it in the databases. Which syster would that be?

  “Ah,” I said. “You see. That’s the problem.”

  They waited patiently, blinking the eyes in sequence around their head.

  “I don’t know which syster it was. I know some details of their physiology.”

  Habren continued blinking, and I decided to anthropomorphize that as a show of polite-and-engaged listening and get on with my life.

  I said, “Large. Perhaps two times my height, three to five times my mass. Bipedal, with manipulating structures not too unlike these.” I held up a forehand. “Strong preference for what we humans would call earth tones.” I sensoed Habren some absorption data to give it an idea about the colors.

  In the answer to one of those ancient philosophical questions, it turns out that nobody’s idea of green is the same as anybody else’s idea of green, at least on a species level—but at least the physics for comparing them all is pretty straightforward.

  It blinked again, perhaps reviewing the data. Perhaps stalling for time.

  Would you care to share why you require this information?

  “I’ll be happy to.” My back was up. I sucked it up against my irrational objections and tuned my irritation back a little. But just a little. Possibly my instincts were telling me something important, and not merely xenophobic. I didn’t trust Habren. But I didn’t kn
ow for sure they were one of the bad guys either. “I’ll share it with the Goodlaw as soon as I can get an appointment with it.”

  Perhaps it will be able to be more helpful, then. The translator made Habren sound inanely cheerful. Somehow, I doubted its actual expressions of emotion were so chipper. Now, on to the matter of resolving your debt. . . .

  “Yes,” I said. “We have no prize.”

  We are aware.

  “But we do have a good deal of information on Freeport pirate activity off the galactic plane.” I left out the part where we could provide detailed descriptions of what appeared to be salvaged Koregoi tech that they seemed to be using—or stealing from renderers.

  I also left out that we’d noticed the pirate ship docked on our way in. Just in case. “That ought to be worth something, right?”

  Something, it agreed. I thought, reluctantly.

  I pressed on. “And we’ve also found out some interesting information about renderers who are murdering Ativahikas and producing organic devashare in quantity. Traffickers. Including something about their hunting grounds, and the coordinates of one of their victims.”

  I really wasn’t going to mention the Koregoi senso to this being, I decided. At the back of my head, I could hear Singer agreeing. We’d send a packet to the Core, just in case. If we could get one out clean, without having to go through Habren’s offices. Or if Singer thought the wheelmind could be trusted.

  Could you corrupt a wheelmind?

  You could probably convince one that maximum preservation of life required going along with some shady business practices.

  The Ativahikas might be grateful for that information, they mused.

  They might be. Who could tell? Who could manage to communicate it to them?

  “Is that enough to justify our fuel and refit expenses?”

  My senso translated the sound it made in reply as a wordless, noncommittal grunt.

  There’s also the matter of your shipmind. We have received word that it is selected for service and is requested to be on the next packet Coreward.

  The constriction of panic squeezed my lungs.

  “I believe he is aware of this selection, and is filing for an extension as we speak. Our intention is to move Coreward as soon as our ship is spaceworthy again, which would actually get him there faster than if he went into service todia, given relative speeds of a direct route and a packet. Never mind the fuel savings.”

  We will have to research whether fuel can be allotted. And other consumables, of course. You will no doubt require sustenance of various kinds for such a long journey.

  The constriction eased a bit, but only a bit. The damned plant was dragging me. What did it want? A bribe of some kind? Or just to slow us down?

  I tuned myself until I could say “That seems reasonable” and sound like I meant it. I thought to myself, Oh slightly corrupt stationmaster, what do you want? What is your motive for being pointlessly obstructionist?

  And was I confused, or had the obstructionism kicked in when I started asking about the Mystery Systers from the Milk Chocolate Marauder?

  What was going on with Habren, then?

  Maybe they just hated being exiled to the ass-back of nowhere on this shitty station without enough resources to control it properly. Maybe they wanted out, or enough resources allotted to help them fight the pirates. Or maybe they themselves were beholden to pirates. They probably had no choice but to deal with them occasionally, so far from the might of the Core.

  And either they did not wish to be so beholden, and were willing to bend rules for what seemed to them a good purpose—or they didn’t mind at all, because the pirates were paying.

  Possibly I’d just given away a lot of useful information to the people who were hunting us.

  It occurred to me that it was possible that the alien tech in my skin could by itself buy Habren an awful lot of goodwill and resources. Then it took all my willpower not to start picking self-consciously at the skin on my hand.

  Calm down, Haimey.

  Habren’s avenues of attack were limited, if they were in with the pirates, because they had to maintain some kind of deniability. Especially where Singer was concerned, with him suddenly a member of government and of significant interest to the Synarche.

  So I felt like once we came to the agreement, we were in a better condition. Habren could pass word around to other stations that we were bad citizens, but coming from an outpost like this, and with our prior reputation for plain dealing, it wouldn’t do us too much harm. They could try to arrest us for reckless driving. They could take their own sweet time about deciding whether to fuel and supply us for the run home, and then about actually performing the fueling and supplying.

  For now, though, we signed off on the preliminary deal—that Habren was going to research the logistics of allowing us to run Singer home—and I made sure a copy of the info went into the mail system before I left their office. Packet mail was an encoded, AI-protected, Synarche-run system. It could probably be hacked by somebody better than me, but I didn’t think it could be hacked tracelessly, and if the contract and the record that we had proposed bringing Singer in ourselves existed and reached the Core before we—presumably moving faster—did . . .

  Well, with a little luck, they might come looking if we got lost.

  It was possible that Habren could keep the mail from going through at all. That was a level of dysfunction that I sincerely hoped we wouldn’t have to contend with, though. We might just have already lost, if that were the case.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  After the near tropicality of the stationmaster’s office, the Goodlaw’s office was absolutely delightful. I did not so much walk as float in, as the gravity this far upwheel was pretty slight, which made me a lot more comfortable. And I floated in not knowing what to expect, and found myself at once enchanted.

  It’s considered polite, in varied-climate habitats such as stations and multispecies hospitals, to warn your guest if they might be entering an environment that could prove hazardous to their species. Ox breathers, in general, could manage each other’s habitats—at least in space, where the super-Earth life-forms made do with vastly undercompensating approximations of gravity, since the alternative would have been spinning stations so fast that they would be challenged not to fly to bits. Fortunately, high-gravity types tended to be pretty tough creatures, albeit with a tendency to succumb to the bends.

  The station’s Goodlaw was the opposite of one of those: an ox breather, and one who liked a supersaturated environment by human standards. Senso told me when I walked in that ox was at 33% of the atmosphere, which explained why absolutely everything inside the office was nonflammable. The temperature was balmy, the air dryish, and the whole office suffused with a pleasant, indirect light.

  Based on that, and how the walls were hung with broad nets meant to resemble interwoven vines, I was pretty sure that I was about to be confronted by a—

  —two-meter praying mantis, more or less.

  Many-faceted eyes poked out from behind a privacy curtain, followed closely by a slender protothorax and a pair of folded raptorial limbs, along with a pair of more delicate manipulators. It advanced a few delicate steps on its long, fragile legs—the homeworld of this syster species was low-gravity—and I clenched my fists in my pockets and tried very hard to control my atavistic terror. It wasn’t going to eat me, but my limbic system was certain of the opposite of that.

  Its name, in a terrible transliteration, was Goodlaw Cheeirilaq, or that was what it said in the English portion of the sign by the door, and it was a Rashaqin, one of the most technologically established and gentlest of the systers, and never mind that it looked like something that would eat a meter-and-a-half-long wasp for dinner.

  It seemed to have an ovipositor, so I guessed it was female, but having no idea how gender constructs worked in Rashaqin society, I decided to just keep thinking of it as an it. Enough other critters have called me an it since I left the clade—where
they would have taken grave offense—that it’s become just another pronoun. There are more important things to fuss about in space than whether the whatchamacallit’s translator system is telling it you’re a them or an it or a whatchamacallit yourself.

  I bowed, an act of respect that seemed to be understood, as the Goodlaw returned the gesture with a lowering on its head and forethorax. As it came into sight, the resemblance to an Earth insect I’d only seen in lucky pet cages on some other ships both strengthened and faded.

  My new acquaintance had broad wings that were folded under light green sheaths along its spine. But it walked on six legs in addition to its manipulators and raptorial forelimbs. Its little hooked feet anchored it neatly to the webworks, though it seemed at home in the very light gravity.

  “I don’t have an appointment,” I said. “But your door was open.”

  The insect stridulated, Greetings, friend Dz. I am forewarned that you have police business for me to consider.

  Transferring the documentation was easy; I just forwarded senso clips of my exploration of the factory ship and the two pirate attacks to the Goodlaw. Cheeirilaq asked me to make myself comfortable while it reviewed the documents, which didn’t take it as long as I would have expected. Probably it had AI assistance.

  These are unedited?

  “Nearly,” I said. “Our shipmind removed 3.5 seconds containing proprietary information necessary to our salvage operations, which we are not required to release.” That proprietary information, loosely so termed, was the pinprick.

  I see you had not filed for a permit for this salvage operation.

  “There was no appropriate jurisdiction to file in, as we were in unincorporated space.”

  The Goodlaw knew, and I knew, that we could have filed with our station of departure. It tilted its head, studying me with all its multifaceted eyes, and stridulated something that my senso returned as untranslatable. I assumed it was a thinking noise.