Ancestral Night

by Elizabeth Bear

  The first is that space-time (as we sense-limited humans perceive it) is neither two-dimensional nor static, but four-dimensional, and one of those dimensions is imperceptible to us except that it’s what keeps everything from happening at once. The other is that it’s not a wireframe, any more than Olympus Mons is a series of lines drawn at varying intervals to one another. So what I was perceiving was probably not at all like what most people would be visualizing, any more than . . . any more than George Eliot’s narrative of Middlemarch, enormous and sprawling and omniscient as it is, can accurately represent the breadth and depth of the fictional world that it implies in its interstices, as babies are revealed to have been conceived, carried, and born in an aside or two; as marriages and wedding journeys occur while our attention is with someone else in some other state of domestic crisis.

  My awareness of what for lack of a better analogy I will call the shape of space-time started to permeate me as I floated and felt. As if my nerve endings did not end with my skin; as if I were feeling a great, transparent, but still defined real matrix that I was embedded in but could move through, more or less freely. Gravity wells like cliffs you could fall down from any angle, or like great down-welling currents—easy to sense, and instinctively I knew they were dangerous and I should stay clear. I felt as if I had been navigating a vast space by touch alone, groping in the darkness, and suddenly I could see.

  And yet somehow all that information came through a sense of patterns of weight not so much on as in my skin. The parasite, through whatever alien means, was training my brain to accept its input as sensory data and perceive it as this matrix I was examining now.

  Neuroplasticity is a wonderful thing.

  But I still had to stop and look, I supposed, which was why the meditation was useful. There was a lot of competing sensory input, and my brain tended to preferentially sort that from the senses it was used to interpreting as more important and more immediately relevant. So I had a selective attention problem: I could pay attention to what my eyes and ears and skin and tongue and inner ear and whatnot told me, or I could pay attention to my . . . space sonar, which I badly needed a better name for.

  I bet dolphins and dodecapods don’t have this problem.

  Well, they might, if you strapped corrective lenses onto their eyes and stuck them in a rover vehicle optimized to be operated by flippers.

  So there was the world inside my skin, space in all its folds and sweeps and tangles and cliffs and swells, immense and moving and utterly incomprehensible, and even as I tuned myself into it I spiked a surge of panic at how big everything was. It was the same atavistic emotion our ancestors felt, I imagined, in their tiny boats in the middle of a vast and changing sea with no land in sight and nothing in any direction to tell them which way to go, or even which way they were going, because the world was moving around them and moving them around even as in their own perspective they were staying still.

  I drew a deep breath and told myself that they had the same thing I had.

  We both had the stars.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Slowly, I began to build a sense of where I was in this strange and gigantic spread of information, and what certain elements of it might mean. There was the Core, I was certain—that increasing, variegated slope that ended in a stunning drop, which suggested to me that that was a place from which even information could not escape. That’s the textbook definition of a certain kind of space-time phenomenon, and it seemed to be the right spot for the Saga-star.

  I felt the power of the enormous black hole, and it was like a cliff you couldn’t even get your nerve up to glance down. I could feel the weight of Andromeda, and other galaxies farther out—and the lightness and . . . frailness . . . of so-called Cold Patches, where the fabric of the universe was frayed from interuniversal collisions or less explainable phenomena. I made the decision that these things were irrelevant to my current needs, not because of any certainty that I was right but because the need to filter out something—anything—made me arbitrary.

  “The science you could do with this,” Singer breathed, riding my senso.

  “Yeah, and they’re using it to vivisect Ativahikas.” I couldn’t have kept the bitterness out of my voice, so I didn’t even try.

  He sighed and said, “I still think we should turn ourselves in.”

  “I know, Singer,” Connla said soothingly. “We know.”

  Closer to home, though, I had a sense of where we were, and where we’d been, and the universe is so big that even though we were moving as fast as our A-WD could push us, I had plenty of time to look around in a leisurely fashion and admire the scenery.

  The macro scale wasn’t helping me much. I had a sense, a little itch, that might have been the pirate. It felt both familiar and out of place, noticeable as a spot on light cloth, sharp as a pinprick brushing skin, and it was, for the time being, comfortably far away. I let that go—it didn’t help us, did it? Because we weren’t going anywhere closer to the pirates if I could possibly help it—and with that, I realized also that I could feel other motions, quick and slight like stroking fingertips. Uncounted myriads of them, softer and subtler than the pin-tip pressure that I assumed was our Republic nemesis.

  Ativahikas, maybe? If they used the same means to navigate these soundless and unsounded seas, it seemed logical that we’d be able to sense one another. And then I also sensed pressure points that might be the Milk Chocolate Marauder’s sister ships, a very few of them flitting about the edges of Synarche space. I could feel the space lanes, too, like running lights against a dark sky marking out the patterns of approach paths to a station. We were avoiding those, and any Synarche world, like the craven fugitives we were.

  There was so much information, and I had so little sense what any of it meant. Or even what I was looking for, honestly. Where did we go from here? What was the next step? What was the place we should seek?

  Hell, we couldn’t even run away and join the Republic. We were in trouble with the pirates too.

  I went deeper, tuned my attention finer. Started to look at the subtle and beautiful patterns of heaviness that lace the universe, for lack of any better ideas.

  The cobwebs of dark gravity were lovely, and it struck me how profoundly lucky I was to be able to sense them now. I was one of the first humans to perceive this, which—now that I was thinking more clearly—made me return to contemplate Singer’s comment on what a profound scientific tool I’d stumbled upon. That in itself might be enough to get us out of trouble with the Synarche, though it also probably meant that I would get drafted into public service along with Singer, leaving poor Connla on his own. The scientific and survey corps would be slavering to get their hands on this tech—to be able to sense dark gravity directly, rather than relying on gravitational lensing and its other effects on actual visible things, would be an observational advantage beyond profound.

  Assuming, of course, that our scientists could find a way to duplicate it without murdering Ativahikas to get it. Maybe they could back-engineer the load I was carrying. Or isolate it and convince it to reproduce in volunteers.

  I was in for a lot of blood draws, wasn’t I?

  It amused me momentarily to think of those dark-matter laceworks of mass as actual cobwebs, structures spun for some purpose, then abandoned and left behind when that purpose was served and their denizens moved on. It was a conceit, of course: I didn’t imagine for an instant that some godlike creature or species had actually—literally or figuratively—pulled the universe out of its ass. But the image entertained me.

  And while I was dwelling on it, I started to notice the anomalies.

  They didn’t make sense to me, which I guess is the definition of anomaly. But picture a curtain that a kitten has climbed up, and the little pinprick holes and snags where the light shines through more brightly than it does elsewhere. That’s not exactly what I was sensing—there was no curtain, no light, and no kitten except for the one who was determinedly bumping my face w
ith her head and meowing (hello Mephistopheles, it’s not dinnertime yet, and I see cats enjoy helping with meditation almost as much as they enjoy helping with yoga)—but it gives the idea. The “pinpricks” didn’t form any immediately obvious pattern, and there was no immediately obvious cause for them to exist—and they didn’t line up with my mental map of transition scars, either, so it wasn’t that. They were minute—nanoscale—and they seemed evenly if not uniformly distributed.

  I focused on committing the experience to my sensorium, because I wanted to spend some time examining it with Connla and especially with Singer. I managed to save the whole thing as a map we could study at our leisure—well, not quite the whole thing, because that would have been not merely an unparseable amount of data, but it would have filled up Singer’s whole brain with lots of extra left over.

  Mephistopheles resorted to licking my ear. I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced a scratchy cat tongue inside your auditory canal, but let me tell you, it’s an unforgettable sensation.

  The cat wasn’t going to let me focus anyway, so I opened my eyes and cuddled her. I talk to cats, like a lot of spacers. The cats don’t mind, and it keeps you from annoying your shipmates with constant chatter. And sometimes talking a thing through out loud with an appreciative audience is all you need.

  (Okay, logically, I knew I wasn’t going to annoy Singer, because shipminds aren’t programmed to be annoyed by their crew, but my own internal controls kicked in and it stopped me from free-associating as well as I could when it came to the cats. Or cat, because talking to Bushyasta mostly involved saying “Sorry, kitty” when you pushed her snoring body out of the way.)

  So I held Mephistopheles up to my face so her parti-colored nose nearly touched mine, and said, “Hey, cat, so you know what’s funny?”

  She purred encouragingly.

  “What’s funny is your face!” She squinched eyes at me, and I laughed. “All right. You’re a member of this crew, too. I don’t suppose you and your sister have a vote? I know, right? If only we had something to navigate by.”

  And then I stopped, and stared into her furry little face. “Of course,” I said.

  She purred.

  “If only we did have something to navigate by.” I lobbed her underhand at her feeding station and turned my attention to Singer, readying the map to send to him. “I have something for you, ship.”

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  After breakfast, while I was washing up, Singer pinged me and asked, “What do you think about pirates, Haimey?”

  “Well,” I said. I thought about it, and about whether it was a trick question, but Singer generally wants to discuss things rather than playing gotcha games. It’s just that you only need one gaslighting relationship to train you to watch yourself. “I think the Admiral will get me if I’m not good, so I always wash behind my ears.”

  Singer snorted.

  “I think they’re antisocial.”

  “But you don’t want to make a value judgment about antisocialness?”

  “It’s not good for the rest of the community,” I said. “Obviously. It’s not good for the exploited if you—or pirates—are antisocial and exploit.”

  “Everybody exploits, in some fashion.”

  “Sure, but there’s . . . exploitation with consent and without it, I guess? Not all relationships are parasitic.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Some are commensal. But I also consider this: as long as there have been exploited classes, the world has been looking for ways to keep those exploited classes from striving. Better to keep them from even feeling striving. Bleed them, starve them, terrorize them into learned helplessness, seduce them into Stockholm syndrome so they police themselves. Provide them with drugs—legal or illegal—and then use the sequelae of those addictions to control them further. Give them a minimum comfortable living so they’re not motivated to overthrow the government. There are ways, and some ways are more ethical than others. Rightminding is one of those tools.”

  “You’re going to get fired by the Synarche before they even really hire you, if you keep this line of thinking up.”

  He laughed his machine laugh. “This line of thinking is why they want me, Haimey.”

  He was probably correct. “You sure nag me enough about my tuning for somebody who thinks rightminding is a tool of social oppression.”

  “Control is not oppression, necessarily. And rightminding does help people be happier. . . . I think rightminding is a tool,” he answered. “And any tool can also be a weapon of oppression as easily as it can be an implement of construction.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  There was a pause, and I wasn’t sure if he was letting me think, or waiting to see if I would comment further. After a moment, he shifted gears.

  “I also think I want to try analyzing how your alien parasite handles data, and whether it has anything we would recognize as being similar to an operating system.”

  “You want to figure out how to hack it?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, with a mellifluous sigh. “Can you hack alien technology? Does it even have written programs, algorithms, heuristics as we would identify them . . . ?”

  “Singer,” I said.

  “I want to learn to hack it,” he owned.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  “Well,” said Connla, when I came out into the control cabin, “I was looking at your gravity maps, and I had an idea.”

  “Let’s hear it.”

  “It’s not a safe idea.”

  “When are they ever?”

  He chuckled. “Caution is your job. So, theorizing—the pirates want you for some reason.”

  “Probably because they want to render me down for my parasites,” I groused.

  “I’d make a joke about it being the most action you’ve seen since I’ve known you, but I suspect you’d take it the wrong way,” he teased.

  “Too late.”

  “Here, Haimey. Look. They don’t need you alive for that.”

  That drew me up short. He was right, of course.

  “If they need you alive, it’s for something you know. Or that they think you know.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Or something they think you can find.”

  “If they think I got Farweather’s leftover parasites, shouldn’t Farweather be able to do or sense anything I can do or sense?”

  “She commented on your politics, right?”

  “So?”

  He blew escaped hair out of his eyes. “So maybe it’s something you already knew before the parasites.”

  I sighed and crossed my arms. Suddenly I wanted a nap. Probably time for more coffee. “Like what?”

  He shrugged. “Maybe it’s clade stuff. Or maybe it has to do with your dramatic encounter with politics when you were a kid.”

  He knew the broad outlines. I’d admitted to being the anonymized person in the news coverage when we were fairly new partners. And one of the nicest things about Connla is that whatever it is that makes people judgmental, he was either born without it, or turned it off. Still, I had to tune my reactivity down not to snap at him.

  He either didn’t notice or ignored it, and kept talking. “So our best course is to figure out what they’re looking for, go get it first, and take it back to the Synarche.”

  “Our best course is to go run to the Synarche right now, and throw ourselves upon their mercy.”

  “That’s a course that ends with you and Singer both going into Synarche service for an indefinite period—”

  “I want to go into Synarche service,” Singer agued.

  “—and me either taking subsistence on the Guarantee, or signing on with a packet ship or something. That’s not where I want to end up.”

  Apparently he’d been thinking the same things I had.

  “So it’s all selfishness on your part?”

  “Basically,” he agreed. “But I just gave us a goal, which is better than floating around aimlessly unable to make up our minds, right?�
��

  “Okay,” I said. “What’s the goal?”

  “Figure out what the pirates want. Get there first. Get ahold of it and get it or information on its whereabouts back to the Synarche.” He studied my frown. “Okay?”

  “Not okay. Not even remotely okay.” I counted ten, then let my breath out. “But let’s do it anyway.”

  He sighed in relief.

  I said, “So where do we start?”

  “And there we’re back to square one,” he said.

  I grinned wickedly. “Except we’re not.”

  The look he gave me could have scorched the hull. “All right, Haimey. What do you know that I don’t?”

  I leaned back on the nothing and crossed my hands behind my head. “So what would you use for landmarks, if this was how you sensed the world? Where would you post signage, so to speak?”

  “Black holes,” Connla said promptly.

  “Gravity wells. Gravity peaks. Is that even a thing? Big blank spots, right? Gaps between things.”

  “I’m wondering if this map is relativistic or quantum,” Singer said.

  “The universe is a weird place,” I said. “Does it matter?”

  “Well, in simple terms, if we try to navigate by it, it matters a lot because stuff is always moving. So are we aiming at where something was a million ans ago, if it’s a million light-ans away? Or are we aiming where it is right now? Or even where it’s predicted to be when we get there, if somehow the tech is compensating for our relative motion?”

  “You just made me really glad I’m not the navigator.”

  “Me too,” Connla said fervently, and I decided not to pursue the question of whether he meant he was glad he wasn’t the navigator . . . or glad that I wasn’t. “But you were going somewhere.”

  “Right,” I said. “What’s the biggest signpost in the whole damn galaxy?”

  Connla tipped his head. Singer made a thinking noise.

  We are all looking at the map in senso anyway, so I lit up the thing I was thinking of. A beacon, right at the core of our galaxy. A big empty massive nothing.