Ancestral Night

by Elizabeth Bear

  We paused beside a low, puce-colored plant that had the rough architecture of a mammalian brain and seemed otherwise unprepossessing, but was nevertheless absolutely darting and swarming with bright-winged butterflies. Or butterfly analogues; I didn’t know enough to be able to tell, and couldn’t be arsed to check my senso for the data.

  It was busy, anyway.

  We turned again, this time back toward the aquaculture area. “And Habren? What’s their deal?”

  My new friend paced alongside me on six slender legs, the two deadly looking raptorial manipulators folded against its forethorax, the more delicate ones waving gently in the air. Allow me to encrypt this conversation?

  The stationmaster might, in fact, be eavesdropping on our senso. The Goodlaw, in fact, had access to law-enforcement encryption tools.

  “Of course.”

  It wouldn’t be suspicious at all that Goodlaw Cheeirilaq and I were talking about it over encrypted channels, of course. But the Goodlaw being the law in these parts, and the Synarche Space Guard being out of town currently, I decided to trust its judgment. There was a tickle as Cheeirilaq established a secure socket into my sphere, requesting limited permissions that I readily granted. It wouldn’t prevent a really determined eavesdropper, but it would slow them down a little.

  I hoped I would meet you here, it said. I’ve been monitoring your movements, under orders from [Habren], and I noticed your pattern of visits. Since I come here fairly often myself, a chance meeting would seem unremarkable.

  Speaking out loud would make the secure connection useless, so I replied silently. You don’t trust Habren.

  There was the virtual equivalent of a shrug. [Habren] is no worse than many. This place is in dire need of personnel support. The Republic is involved in its management through extortion, as you have no doubt deduced, and [Habren] does not care for being beholden to pirates. However, obtaining defensive personnel is less than easy. Material resources are less of a problem, obviously, because we have excellent printing support and the local system for materials.

  If [Colonel] [Habren] could manage some major coup, they might get more attention and support. That would benefit Habren and also the station, and disbenefit the pirates.

  Where do all these plants come from, if resources are so scarce? I asked.

  Shipped as seed, often traded with other hobbyists. The soil is manufactured. All the pollinators are local-system. The only real resource expenditure is space, and as you have noticed, the station is not crowded.

  Habren’s interest is not why you sought me out, however. I felt alarm that Habren had set the Goodlaw to watch me, and confusion at the Goodlaw’s loyalties. Habren might be worse than Cheeirilaq was admitting. If there was a chance we were being monitored, it wouldn’t exactly want to call out its . . . well, the stationmaster wasn’t precisely its boss, but somebody in greater authority over the station than it held itself . . . in a recordable format. And it couldn’t entirely know my loyalties, either.

  I recognize your tattoos.

  Well, that shifted me from mild alarm to sirens shrieking so badly I had to tune myself down to mere alert arousal just in order to hear the rest of the conversation. I took a deep breath and held it and turned my amygdala down to about three, then let the breath out again.

  You can see them? I asked, glancing down at my nanoskin-covered arm.

  Ultraviolet reflectivity. A wing-settle that could be an insectoid shrug.

  I was looking for information on the syster operating the factory ship, I said. Noncommittal, and something it already knew. There’s nothing in our databases, which might be nothing or might be withheld information. Habren claimed they had no information either, but they might be lying.

  That’s because the species operating the factory ship is not a syster.

  I actually turned to the giant bug and gaped, dumbstruck. As far as I knew, every intelligent race that the Synarche had encountered had, eventually, been induced to join it. The fact of an enormous, existing trade organization and governmental body that, in general, had overwhelmingly superior technology to any emerging race and also a complete monopoly on exploration and trade generally proved a convincing argument. Once a species developed what Terrans called the Alcubierre-White drive, or one of its variant technologies, the Synarche was waiting to greet them.

  Sometimes new systers tried to start a shooting war, which generally had similar results to a kitten attacking your pants leg; when the difference in available force is so overwhelming, and you’re essentially raising a child, there’s literally no need to shoot back. Even races as belligerent as my own had come around eventually.

  A few went with isolationist policies for a local generation or two, but eventually somebody started tuning into the propaganda channels and wanting all that great stuff, and within a hundred ans or so—well, the Synarche was also patient. Like a respectful suitor—unlike my friend Rohn in the bar—it had nothing to gain by hurrying things.

  Earth could have learned a long time ago that securing initial and ongoing consent, rather than attempting to assert hierarchy, is key to a nonconfrontational relationship. Because we’re basically primates, we had to wait for a bunch of aliens to come teach us. We’d at least, by then, developed the tech to fix our brains so we could accept emotionally what logic should have showed us.

  What can I say? We’re slow.

  Not a syster? I asked. I mean, there were the Ativahikas, which weren’t exactly a syster, not really talking to the rest of us much. And not having a white space drive so much as being a white space drive. . . .

  Suddenly, all the glittering particles gliding gracefully and harmlessly between the cells of my epidermis seemed to ferociously itch. I’m not a praying sentient, but at that moment, I felt such a horrible black hole of implication implode in my belly that I almost doubled over in pain. Cheeirilaq put a manipulator on my shoulder to steady me.

  That’s why you recognize the tattoos, I said.

  The particles are derived from the sensory organs of Ativahikas. They are not widely known; in fact, their existence is kept a secret outside of law enforcement circles. They are believed to be a form of Koregoi technology that was given to or traded for or somehow imbued into the Ativahika species in a time of great antiquity. In combination with certain innate abilities of the Ativahikas, they allow the species to—

  I interrupted. —to traverse space-time as if they were living starships. And somebody is stealing these particles, by murdering Ativahikas. And I have a bit of this technology embedded in me.

  I’m sorry, Cheeirilaq stridulated, reminding me that the rest of the conversation had been carried out in utter silence.

  We stopped before the aquaculture observation windows.

  I am glad, the Goodlaw continued, that you did not acquiesce to this anathema knowing its origin.

  I’m a walking war crime.

  Yes.

  The dodecapod was hard at work when we paused. It had a combined head and body about a meter across. It didn’t speak to us, seeming involved in its labors, but as we paused it raised six of its twelve legs in a cheery wave, flashing ripples of electric blue and silver across its normally sedate dark red surface. Maybe it recognized us; apparently we were both around enough, and we’d been waiting for clearance to leave for more than two dia. Also, dodecapods and humans have kind of a long-term friendly relationship. I don’t remember all the details, but we found them before they invented spaceflight—spaceflight is a rough invention for aquatic species, for a number of obvious reasons, though they’re great astronauts once somebody gets them up here, and the noncompressibility of water means they’re often really good at remaining functional in erratic gs—and before the Synarche brought us in as systers, but after we’d developed crude rightminding technology.

  So our species are, in the parlance of the Synarche, elder systers to one another.

  Cheeirilaq and I both waved back.

  Does Habren know?

  Chee
irilaq’s wing coverts buzzed. That seemed more like a shrug than a yes, given what I also picked up through the senso.

  Who. Who did this to me?

  They are Jothari. The Synarche’s greatest tragedy. But I think it was Terran pirates who murdered their crew and stole their ship and . . . cargo. Such a wave of distaste that I could feel it through the senso, despite our incompatible neurologies.

  The name meant nothing to me.

  What do you mean, the Synarche’s greatest tragedy? We don’t have tragedies anymore.

  Well, Cheeirilaq said, perhaps we still did, a long time ago.

  And it proceeded to tell me the history of how the Synarche learned to be a patient suitor, because it turns out that making mistakes is how we grow up, whether we’re a multispecies alien utopia, or just some dude screwing up their first romance beyond believability.

  This is what I learned: early on, when the Synarche was new, it was not a Synarche yet at all, but a Galactic Parliamentary Democracy—and grandiosely so named, because in those diar it consisted of five or six of the foundation systers and perhaps a dozen systems. The short version of a very long and ugly story is that by the time the Galactic Parliamentary Democracy encountered the Jothari, the Jothari were working on establishing a smaller but still thriving interstellar community of their own. They’d come of age in one of the sparser and darker arms of the Milky Way—not unlike my own species, as it happened, so I feel a certain sympathy for this—and had never seen any evidence of sentient life until a Parliamentary ship dropped out of white space over their homeworld, ascertained that they were a spacefaring species, and opened communications in as friendly a manner as possible, considering a language gap.

  I mean, when you show up in orbit over somebody else’s inhabited planet, not dropping a rock on it or tossing your bow wave in their direction is, in itself, a reasonable assurance of goodwill, but not everybody understands that—and there is, I suppose, the possibility that you might want a quickly habitable planet afterward.

  Anyway, the Jothari had managed to reach a couple-three of their closest neighbor systems, and had pretty good shipping and space-colonization efforts going on. Then the Galactic Parliamentary Democracy ship full of weirdos like my friend the Goodlaw showed up and opened communications. The Parliamentary crew was not met in a friendly fashion, but at least no shots were fired.

  They drew back, and that was when they found out that the Jothari were navigating by harvesting Ativahikas, a species generally-accepted-as-sentient, who had a migratory path running through the core of Jothari space. The Synarche’s antecedents tried to intervene, leading to the beginnings of a war.

  Through absolute blind bad luck, an antibiotic-resistant pandemic broke out among the Jothari worlds around then, and somewhere between 60 and 80 percent of their population died. They declared this an act of war on the part of the proto-Synarche, and came gunning.

  There was a lot more of the proto-Synarche, and despite the Jothari superior navigation, the Synarche . . . wiped them out.

  Not to the last being. But to the last world, leaving those that remained homeless. And not welcome in proto-Synarche space—if they would have considered coming near the government that had committed semi-involuntary genocide against them. So they made their way as best they could.

  Maybe they have shadow colonies, Cheeirilaq said. Maybe they’ve gone as far out as Andromeda and possibly even made allies there. Though if they had, I’m not sure we’d still find them scavenging around the edges of Synarche space.

  They’re not in the databases.

  No. Well, you could find them. They’re not expunged. Just deemphasized. And it’s possible the archinformists used keywords that were less than helpful to the neophyte to archive and classify the data.

  Possible. Sure. And Habren doesn’t want me to know about them?

  [Habren’s species] was one of the ones involved in the initial mistake. It gave me its version of Habren’s species name, which was as made-up as the human version, the original being in plant pheromones. They’re culturally very ashamed. That was about the time people started looking for a better system of government, it turns out. My people have a saying, that every civilization is founded in a terrible crime.

  There didn’t seem to be much I could say to that. Even given my limited knowledge of the vast span of Terran history, terrible crimes seemed terribly commonplace, and didn’t usually lead to enlightenment.

  The swirling, sinking sensation in my gut was grief, and I let myself feel it, along with the gratitude for what the Synarche was. Imperfect, surely; infested with its own brands of sophipathology and problematic social constructs. Walking a fine and wavering balance between the conformity and regulation necessary for social cohesiveness and the observance of individual freedoms within reason.

  But also comprised of such a plurality of individuals and syster species spread across such vast distances that it was difficult to obtain an even vaguely accurate census, and somehow, through the tuned social consciences of all of us, managing to function.

  There was pride to be taken in that.

  It never could have happened without rightminding. And rightminding, taken to extremes, gave you clades. But clades also made a lot of people happy who would have been lonely and broken and without community otherwise.

  Nothing is perfect. Except the Well. And what could be more perfect than the great big gravity chute of Supermassive Black Hole Saga-star, churning along in its spot at the center of the Milky Way? That’s pretty near as perfect as a thing can conceivably be: a horizon of perfect destruction.

  Why do you do this? Cheeirilaq asked me, breaking a contemplative silence I hadn’t noticed until it ended. The mantid was one of those creatures you could just hang around with, not saying anything, and not notice the quiet because it felt natural. I would have liked it for a shipmate, though Singer would have been a little small. You could go sit planetside and do pretty much anything at all forever, without competition for scarce resources. So why come out here and risk your neck at all?

  Huh. Apparently humans and twelve-legged, six-winged mantids have some of the same expressions of speech. Who would have guessed?

  I was born out here. Why do you? I countered.

  Crowded homeworld. I remembered from somewhere, possibly crèche, that Cheeirilaq’s people are solitary except for mating and child-rearing. The latter of which is carried on in nursery crèches in which all adults are expected to take a turn. Other than that, they have hobbies and entertainments and pretty much keep to themselves, being intensely territorial.

  “One Rashaqin, one station,” as they say. Not because they’re so tough. Because they just really don’t get along.

  Strange that it seemed perfectly able to get along with unrelated sentients. Maybe that was pheromones.

  It said, Had to go somewhere. I like solving crimes.

  That doesn’t tell me how you wound up out here in this nest of Freeport sympathizers.

  It whetted its killing manipulators one over the other, which looked like a threat but might have been a shrug. Got into some administrative trouble in the Core.

  Noncommittally.

  I wondered if it had eaten a suspect. If it had, I hoped the suspect deserved it. It seemed like a good cop, as such things went, and I’d hate to think less of it.

  Cheeirilaq sighed. An enormous sigh, like a Terran dog. Its entire abdomen filled with air, swelling each of its breathing chambers until the brilliant red bands around its abdomen were wider than the green, and I could see that they were each edged in thin ribbons of black and a mustardy yellow. I gawped at it in surprise, though really, all sorts of creatures sigh. Oxing up is a sensible response to just about any situation or potential situation that doesn’t require immediately holding one’s breath. And if you’re going to have to hold your breath, well, you might as well be good and pink—or purple, or that nice blue color some critters use to hold oxygen, if that’s your thing—when you do so.

/>   I might have to bring you in, it said, reluctantly admitting something we’d both known all along. It stridulated out loud again. I have sent a packet Coreward regarding our earlier conversation, but please understand that I am basically in exile here, and I find that many of my communications go missing.

  I thought of my reliance on the packets for security and a chance of backup, and tuned my anxiety down a peg. It wasn’t helping.

  “No hard feelings if you do,” I answered. “A bug’s gotta eat, after all.”

  Also, it said, allowing me to sense reluctance, I know you have some embarrassing political secrets to keep.

  That stunned me to silence for long seconds. I blinked, swallowed, tuned, nodded. I might have to run away, you understand.

  That is the sensible thing to do when a larger predator is pursuing you. No hard feelings at all.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  I was so deep in my head while bounding gently along the corridor back to Singer that it took most of the circumference of the station before I realized I was being followed. Followed pretty expertly, too—my shadow stayed far enough back in the curve that I never got a good look at them (bipedal and humanoid, but not much else), even when I ducked into a shop and came out reversing direction as if I’d spotted something back along the concourse that I wanted to go investigate.

  That set my mind racing again, but in a different direction.

  Habren wouldn’t need to shadow me, because nobody can hide on a station from the wheelmind and the stationmaster. Every centimeter of the interior is under some kind of surveillance, and while you could get lost in a crowd on one of the big ones, maybe, Downthehatch just wasn’t large enough. Habren might want to dust me, in which case an ambush was more likely than a stalker. If they wanted to send me down the well, they could just jump me when I went back to Singer.

  Or a lift or airlock could be arranged to have a convenient accident. Theoretically there were safeguards against that kind of thing—above and beyond rightminding and AI oversight—but I was pretty sure by now that Habren’s rightminding was not as stable and maintained as you might like in somebody with a few tens of thousands of lives in their hands.