Ancestral Night

by Elizabeth Bear

  The biggest well of them all.

  “And if I’m wrong,” I said cheerily, “we’re close to the Core, and closer to help, and farther from where the pirates generally roam.”

  “Sure,” Connla grumped. “All the more convenient for turning ourselves in.”

  “We’re going to wind up deemed antisocial for sure! We might as well be ready!” I said cheerily, and went back to checking coordinates with Singer against the map in my head.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Being inbound rather than surfing the periphery had advantages as well as disadvantages. One of the advantages was that as we entered more inhabited spaces, we had the aid of navigational buoys, which were full of newsy information packets. In the ordinary course of events, these packets would have automatically downloaded into Singer’s storage whenever we dropped out of white space near one, while any unduplicated packets from elsewhere that he was carrying would be uploaded to the buoy.

  Thus was data propagated around the Synarche in the most efficient means possible given lightspeed limitations on transmission.

  This was a great system, unless you were a fugitive.

  We could have faked up a false origin packet, between Singer and me, but tampering with the mail was an offense that would get us into more trouble and obligation than breaking some traffic regulations on our way out of a slightly seedy space station—and since tampering with the mail was one of the things we were concerned might have happened to our earlier packet and hoped to report if so, it would probably behoove us not to commit the same crime ourselves.

  The pirates could probably follow or at least locate us even while we were in white space, which nobody else could manage. So they had better ways to track us than by trying to hack the interstellar mail tracelessly (that last word is key)—which even Singer wasn’t sure he could manage, as the minds that ran it were big and old and wise in the ways of logistics and treachery, as well as having abundant cycles to play with. There was the possibility that we needed to dodge Goodlaw Cheeirilaq, who would be using things like packet transfers to follow us.

  I really didn’t want Cheeirilaq to be in with the pirates. Maybe I had a kind of intellectual crush on the old bug. It’s easier for me to form connections in contexts where I can’t really feel emotionally vulnerable.

  But I also didn’t want to operate under the assumption that it wasn’t tracking us just because I liked it. And it could have been tracking us because we’d basically torn up the system on our way out of Downthehatch. We could have just shut down our transponder (also illegal), or we could have faked a malfunction (illegal, but only if you got caught).

  The complication lay in the fact that we also needed the information we could get from the packets—we had to stay updated about traffic patterns, hazards, and whether there were any developments in current affairs we needed to be aware of. Such as, for example, a BOLO on a salvage tug answering Singer’s description and registration number.

  So what Singer decided he would do was to mark our packets as confidential and highest priority, addressed to the Synarche Grand Council, and he loaded them with every bit of information we’d gleaned about the pirates and about Downthehatch.

  “I’ll want to include the data on your parasite,” he told me while I was staring over the top of my screen instead of reading for the third or twelfth time about how Clarissa Harlowe, whose virtue was arguable but whose lack of ability to learn from her mistakes was manifest, was tricked back into the brothel by the dastardly Lovelace.

  Why are people named Lovelace always villains when they appear in questionable literature? The only more certain moral doom lies in being named Raffles.

  “Excuse me?” I said. I wasn’t holding the screen, just letting it float before me. It dimmed when my eye drifted off it. I glanced down at my hand, frowning at the silvery cobwebs.

  “We need to drop out and dump our bow wave anyway,” Singer said. “The particle field is getting pretty thick up front. I think, when we check in with a beacon, we ought to include the data we’ve collected on your parasite.”

  “Making me even more of a target.”

  “For science,” he said. “And so the navy knows what they’re dealing with if they decide to go after the pirates.”

  I felt a pang at the thought of Farweather in a navy brig.

  “Your acquaintance is a criminal,” Singer reminded me.

  “She’s not a friend,” I told him. “I know that. And I don’t usually go in for the sexy bad-girl thing.”

  “Since when?” Connla shot across the cabin. I hadn’t heard him drift in. “You know I’m not the greatest fan of authority, but I feel like we need to share information. In case something does happen to us, and for our own protection.”

  That was hard to argue with. It just . . . felt like my privacy was being invaded. It was another step toward the inevitable gateway leading me into Synarche service, my freedom curtailed, surrounded—again—by people who had nothing but my best interests at heart. They could even tune me not to mind it so much, which I wasn’t sure I could stand.

  “I need to think about it,” I said.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Some time passed, and I didn’t do much except stare unreadingly at Clarissa. I could feel Singer watching me. It wasn’t creepy; it was like the sense you get when a family member is in the room, doing something nearby without interacting with or even acknowledging you. But it didn’t bother me the way it would have if it were a family member.

  I’ll be the first to admit, I probably don’t respond to family members the way most people do.

  “What is it?” Singer asked finally.

  I sighed. “Clade flashbacks,” I said.

  “You say that a lot,” Singer said. “But it’s an answer that’s scientifically designed to sound like an answer without actually containing a lot of information.”

  “I have too damned much self-knowledge,” I said bitterly. I glanced around. Connla was on his sleep shift, and as I didn’t see either cat, I assumed they were using him for his immobile body heat while they had the opportunity. If they could, cats would invent full-time full-sensorium VR for all humans everywhere so they could sleep on our immobile bodies eternally. And probably eat our extremities, too.

  “You have some other trauma,” Singer said kindly, and I knew he wasn’t just guessing. His question couched in the form of a statement precipitated such a burst of tremendous rage that if it were anybody else not-asking, I might have punched them. It’s hard to punch a free-floating shipvoice, though, and whaling a bulkhead would look silly, send me spinning across the cabin, and hurt me more than it hurt Singer.

  So I gritted my teeth and—over my own objections—dialed my amygdala back down to a dull roar. Post-traumatic distress is basically a fight-or-flight response gone haywire, and when there’s nothing you can do about it, it’s so fucking boring.

  “Oh, you know the story.” I stuffed my screen into a handy net—spacer’s habit, even when you’re moving in the same straight line you’ve been moving in for weeks, and no chance of a change in vector or v in sight—and kicked across the command cabin to make some busywork for myself restowing a harness that was already perfectly well folded and stowed.

  “Actually,” said Singer, “I don’t.”

  “I left my clade,” I recited, “because I took my mandated an outside it, and discovered that I liked being an individual. So I left, and they weren’t very happy with me.”

  “That,” said Singer gently, “is not a story. It’s a deflection.”

  “A deflection, huh?” I tightened the straps very gently and carefully.

  “One that doesn’t explain the PTSD.”

  “Oh,” I said. “That.” I shrugged. “You know that story too.”

  “I know a version of it. One that’s pretty similar in its gross outlines to the leaving-the-clade story. That you had somebody you loved, and they betrayed you and turned out to be a criminal. That they harmed some others, and you w
ere absolved of complicity in the crimes.”

  “See? You do know everything. The Synarche turned me loose again; I can’t have done anything too terrible.”

  “I didn’t think you had,” he answered softly.

  I dropped the conversational thread, hoping wearily that he wouldn’t pursue it if I looked like I was reading again. Still. I turned a page to make it convincing.

  “I’m not concerned about any terrible things you might have done,” he said quietly. “I’m concerned about the terrible things that happened to you.”

  CHAPTER 11

  THERE WAS A GIRL. THERE’S always a girl, they say, and in this case it was true. Her name was Niyara, and she had green eyes, and she said she loved me. She said she was my best friend, that I was family to her. She said a lot of things.

  She was a walking time bomb.

  In more ways than one.

  Oh, you know. The clues were there. The clues are always there. You just . . . well, you get good at constructing a narrative that explains them away, don’t you? If you’re only supposed to call at certain times, it’s because she’s working and needs to concentrate. If you always seem to meet at your place, it’s because she likes your cats, and because her ex is still sharing the suite with her and having you over is awkward. Housing is at a premium on stations, and it’s hard to get reassigned. Lots of people share space.

  If she seems to forget a lot of things that are important to you, well, she’s distracted; she probably needs to tune her reactivity a little more carefully and she’s one of those people who are reluctant to bump.

  You know how it is. Sometimes you’re a little reluctant to bump as well. You want to have an honest feeling and find out what your subconscious really thinks about something. Except you keep getting weirdly anxious for no reason, and you seem to be bumping a lot to keep that under control.

  Did you know that people with PTSD, when under stress, often use the second person in order to distance themselves from events?

  By now, you’ve figured out that she was married. And lying to me about it, and I guess probably lying to her spouse about me, which are the two significant details, because it’s not like everybody is monogamous, and most people who aren’t, aren’t assholes about it. But she . . . liked being in control, and she liked having secrets, and she liked drama.

  And I knew it, on some level, and I ignored it. I chose to trust, because my hormones were surging, and I was limerent and infatuated, and I wanted with all my heart and soul to believe. In us.

  In her. So once I found out about the wife, I believed her when she told me it was long over, that they were just still living together for convenience. And when I found out they were sleeping in the same bed, I . . . believed her again, and I honestly don’t even remember what the lie was and I cannot bear to go look at my senso logs and find out.

  She was an awful person, and she was using me, and I should have known better. But I was very young, and very in love.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  She was also, it happens, a terrorist.

  I’d just re-upped for my second an of release from the clade—to be with Niyara, as much as because I hadn’t yet decided if I was going to give up the clade for her. I was pretty sure I was, but I was also trying to talk her into coming home to visit.

  “It’s great,” I told her. “Nobody ever argues.”

  “Nobody ever fights for what they believe in, you mean,” she said, which should have been a clue.

  I knew she was a political radical, but when you’re nineteen that’s sexy. I remember one time when we were lying in bed together and just as I was drifting off to sleep, she woke me up to tell me all about why the Synarche was a corrupt institution and must be brought down.

  “It’s a corrupt institution that protects your right to say it should be changed or replaced, as long as you use legal means to do so,” I reminded her. “You’ve got a better system in mind?”

  “One without forced government service,” she said.

  “So you think people who want to run the government should?”

  “You approve of conscripting people instead?”

  “Well, we have enough evidence that making people compete for the job attracts a lot of narcissists. Part of being a community is being part of the governing body. Taking responsibility for its actions and helping to make choices that benefit all the citizenry. Taking responsibility for its well-being, just as you do when you’re part of a family. It’s an obligation and a nuisance, sure, but it’s one we accept for the common good.”

  She had rolled over, and was staring at me. “It’s a draft.”

  “So is jury duty. And required voting on referendums.” I sighed. “Besides, community service builds a sense of community. It allows us to meet our systers and come to regard them as people rather than alien others. It helps hack our neurology and makes us better citizens of the galaxy.”

  “Now you’re just mouthing your civics indoctrination at me. What about freedom? What about individual rights?”

  I was young and self-righteous, and I didn’t know when to quit. We’ve all been there. Anyway, I was, as I believe I said, nineteen. And I’d aced this test. “Nonautocratic government is a meme. It’s a set of ideas arrived at by common agreement and enforced by institutions and the individual consent of the governed. The purpose of nonautocratic government is to provide for individual rights and freedoms, protect the body and welfare of the governed, and engage in projects that exist on too large a scale for individuals to reasonably be expected to complete them. So we serve, if we’re called. It’s a couple of ans, and in return we get stability and livelihood and the personal freedom to, among other things, criticize the system.”

  “I had no idea you were this naive,” she said, in a voice that made me bump hard to dial back the sudden reflexive anger I felt at her dismissal.

  My voice was still keen and too high when I replied, “Sure. And what are you, a pirate?”

  “Freeporter,” she said automatically.

  “So you are one!”

  “No,” she said. “They’re parasites. But they have a few good ideas about personal freedom.”

  “Well, I have a few good ideas about personal responsibility.”

  She got up in a huff and went home.

  To her wife, I suppose.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  I spent the rest of the night cold, alone, and crying—too invested in my own misery and the certainty I’d done it to myself and deserved it. The worst thing you can do to somebody clade-bred is abandon them. We don’t know how to handle it. We don’t know how to handle conflict at all.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  It occurred to me much, much later—after a lot of rightminding—that Niyara knew that, of course, and had used it against me. If I questioned her, if I stood up to her, if I expressed a boundary or told her where to get off, she withdrew. And she made out that it was my fault, also.

  I never fought with her about it again. I went to her meetings, after a while, though I figured out pretty fast from things people would say that I wasn’t invited to all of them.

  I wasn’t a revolutionary—I didn’t become a revolutionary. Okay, maybe slightly; there’s still some things about the Synarche that I think are poorly managed, such as the way they can, in fact, require anyone’s service at any time, taking them away from their careers and loved ones, no matter what else they might have going on.

  And my clade had left me a little . . . embittered isn’t the right word. Ready to interrogate and perhaps reject the values I had been raised with, let’s say.

  So if I were to rebel against my upbringing, political revolutionary on a small scale would be a—reasonable is the wrong word—likely thing for me to pursue. It would certainly shock my clademothers.

  I didn’t understand any of this at the time, mind you. I was too inexperienced for that kind of self-knowledge and had the juvenile kind instead, which mostly consists of finding logical ways to justify whatever it is yo
u feel like doing.

  Nobody ever mentioned terrorism to me.

  Nobody ever mentioned bombs.

  Maybe they knew I would balk. Maybe my indoctrination hadn’t yet proceeded to that level.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  We fought a lot, in retrospect. Constantly.

  I didn’t realize it at the time for several reasons. First of all, because I was from a clade, where nobody fought. Second, because I watched a lot of pipeline dramas, where everybody yells at each other all the time because melodrama is interesting. Third, because . . . well, I’d never been in a relationship before. And because I didn’t have a lot of experience with conflict, I didn’t realize when I was being manipulated into it, or when the conflict itself was being manipulated to direct me in unhealthy ways.

  Case in point, the last argument Niyara and I ever had. I remember that one in particular, because it was the last argument we had. And because I underwent enhanced recollection under Judicial supervision, for the trial, and now I can’t forget. Selective memory, it turns out, is a blessing.

  Even with the enhanced recollection, I can’t remember exactly how it started, because the conversation was so profoundly trivial. We were on couches in one of Ansara Station’s observation pods, drinking tea and staring out the big bubble ports at the universe scrolling past outside. And I was trying to have, well, what I thought was a serious discussion of my prospects for leaving the clade, whether I should, and my prospects for becoming a pilot.

  My prattling trailed off when I noticed Niyara staring at me with incredulity.

  “What?” I said it nervously, looking for reassurance. “You don’t think I have what it takes to be a pilot?”

  She mouthed one of her refrains. “I can’t believe how naive you are.”

  I had been lying sprawled on the couch, my legs kicked over the back. It suddenly felt like far too vulnerable a position to have put myself in. I swung my legs around and sat up, hugging myself. “It can’t be that impossible to get into pilot training. I have good engineering and crisis-response aptitudes.”