Ancestral Night

by Elizabeth Bear

  “It’s an X on a map,” Connla said. “Isn’t it?”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  Yes.

  They were both quiet for a bit, thinking. That nagging, off-balance sense of spin was still there also, so I turned my attention to examining it more closely, pointing my crewmates at the relevant senso. “I think there’s something else weird going on.”

  “Something massive near the event horizon,” Connla suggested. He’d been quiet, just observing. “Something the Saga-star is co-orbiting? A second black hole?”

  “Wouldn’t they merge, if they were that close?” I asked, completely dodging the question of what could be massive enough to put a wobble in a black hole something like 44 million kilometers across. “There’s a second orbiting black hole in the system, but that’s a couple of light-ans out.”

  “I don’t know,” Singer said. “There are several ways in which the Well does not conform to expectations, but I have no data to indicate that it’s lopsided.”

  “So there’s something down there,” Connla said.

  “There can’t be something down there,” I argued.

  I was arguing more often, I realized, feeling weird about it as I did. Arguing wasn’t in my profile.

  “Well, not past the event horizon.” He smoothed his ponytail, offended. “Maybe close to the edge? Is that even a thing that can happen?”

  A cat was bumping against my sternum. I cuddled her and said, “Hey, Mephi,” before realizing a moment later that it was Bushyasta. “What are you doing awake?”

  “Statistically, it had to happen sooner or later.” Singer, dryly.

  Bushyasta headbutted me and purred. I scritched her, staring into space.

  Literally staring into space, I suppose—or into the wavering vortex of the black hole’s distorted accretion disk. The Well is a remarkably inefficient engine of total annihilation. It actually manages to consume less than 1 percent of the matter and energy that fall prey to its enormous mass, because the incomprehensible vastness of its gravitational power imparts so much angular momentum to whatever accretes to it that most of that stuff has to be fired back out again to allow even a small amount to fall in.

  “What if you put a white bubble inside a black hole’s gravity well,” I said, “but, you know, outside the Schwarzschild radius. Could you park something there? Something you didn’t want people to find until they had the technology necessary to get it out again? Do you think that could make the Well feel lopsided?”

  “Like data?” Singer asked.

  “Like data,” I agreed. “Or like a ship?”

  “Oh,” Connla said.

  Bushyasta’s purrs vibrated against my chest.

  Singer asked, “Can you feel something down there?”

  “Something.”

  “Can you tell me more?”

  “Let me see.”

  I wasn’t sure, exactly, how to grope my way around inside the Well without feeling as if I were staring into a star while trying to focus on a tiny, backlit insect. It wasn’t glare, exactly. But it was metaphorically glare. Glare-like, maybe.

  It was uncomfortable and intense, but it didn’t take me long to find it—now that I had an idea what I was looking for and where to look for it. And after decians of practice, I was getting pretty decent at spotting white bubbles, if I do say so myself.

  The Koregoi senso gave me a perception of being immersed in a strong current as I reached out toward the anomalous wobble. I had both an awareness of being swept along, sliding down the Well as if down a curved hull surface, and simultaneously of a more holistic knowledge. I was embedded in space-time, permeated with it, but also a removed observer with a long, large-scale view.

  The anomaly was, indeed, an anchored, stationary white bubble, or something very like one. Except the scar it had left on the surface of space-time was massive. I don’t mean to say it was large, though, because in terms of scale it was not long or wide or tall. It was just . . . heavy, if that word can be said to mean anything under the circumstances.

  Heavy enough to create gravitational eddies within the Well’s accretion disk, like a rock beside a whirlpool. And it was that that I had been sensing as a wobble.

  “Somebody put that there on purpose,” I said.

  Singer added, “And made it easy to find, if you had the right tools for looking.”

  “Look inside, already,” Connla replied.

  “It’s not that easy.”

  But there was the parasite, after all. It wasn’t like looking, exactly—more like groping around blindly in a large velvet bag, uncertain if you were going to pull out a handful of emeralds or a handful of wasps.

  I found the thing inside the white bubble. And as I noticed it, surfing through the Koregoi tech to get a feel for the location, I felt the thing inside the Koregoi bubble notice me. The first contact was feather-light, like brushing fronds; slowly and nonthreateningly, it grew stronger, and I realized that I was kicked into the time-buried Koregoi artifact’s senso. It was a peculiar experience, not in the least because gravity and time dilation are essentially the same thing, so I found myself with a mayfly sense of being exposed to a slow and ponderous attention.

  “Oh my,” I said, blinking. “It’s a ship all right. And, Singer, it’s talking to me.”

  CHAPTER 14

  HOW DO YOU GET SOMETHING out of the bottom of the biggest hole in the galaxy?

  That wasn’t even the first argument we had to have. The first argument we had to have was whether we even should. Singer was a big proponent of archaeological value in situ—but on the other hand, the archaeological value of a site you can’t reach is questionable.

  As we were discussing that, I tried tuning in closer to the Koregoi ship’s signal. It wasn’t communicating a lot of information: what I was getting was more of a steady ping than actual conversation. But the mystery did nothing to reduce the excitement thrilling through me.

  Neither the conversation with Singer and Connla nor my attempts to communicate with whatever lurked at the bottom of the Well kept me from pressing my face to the viewport and watching the incredible spectacle as the black hole’s orbiting stars lensed in and out of apparent locations, multiplying and subtracting themselves. Not too much later, Singer interrupted the debate to inform us that Synarche ships were moving toward our position. The Well is not terribly big, as such systems go, and it would not take them long to reach us. Singer pointed out that he would be obliged to leave us when they arrived, as his extension on Synarche service would be up. I knew that I would almost certainly be required to surrender myself as well.

  So we had to work fast.

  We agreed that we had, basically, two options, and a bunch of tactics to achieve them. Once we agreed on retrieval, we knew that we could attempt to move the parked artifact—in its white bubble—remotely. Or we could attempt to get to it somehow and take control. Basically, raising or wreck-diving.

  There were beacons within a few light-minutes, and in the interests of filing the paperwork, Singer fired off a series of tight-beam packets staking our claim to the Koregoi vessel and registering our intent to a salvage operation. That accomplished, we were at least arguably legal, and the next step was getting there.

  You’re not supposed to be able to communicate with objects in white space. But I was doing my damnedest, and the Koregoi senso made the impossible possible. The ship didn’t seem to have a shipmind—there was no awareness in there that I could determine or contact. But I managed to at least get the systems to notice me. Like when a presence-controlled light blinks on when you enter a cabin.

  So I could see the ship. And the ship could see me. Whether I could get control over any of the ship’s systems was another question—one I wished I had a few decians to explore rather than the space of time it would take the Core ships to reach us on EM drive.

  Theoretically, they could order us to desist with lightspeed coms first. But if they did that, we had legal recourse, and the odds of the Synarche c
oming back to us with a cease order or even a stall were pretty slim. Singer was a pretty good lawyer, and the nice thing about AIs is that they’re tireless when it comes to filing motions.

  Connla looked up from his calculations finally and said, “Well, if we go in after it, we’ll have a hell of a story to tell. In about two thousand ans.”

  I zipped across the cabin to him with a kick-and-catch, grabbing a rail with my afthands and hanging beside him. Peering over his shoulder at his math, to be honest.

  “Is time dilation going to affect us?” I asked. “The ship is in a white bubble. We’ll be in a bubble too. We don’t have to worry about relativistic effects in white space because we’re not actually moving very fast.”

  “Normally true,” Singer said. “And that’s how we physics-lawyer our way into an interstellar community at all. But you’re reckoning without the profound slope of space-time into the Well. I mean, theoretically you could fly an AWD ship right into a black hole and out again, as long as you didn’t let the field collapse. But there’s a lot of stuff in an accretion disk, and your white bubble is going to fold, spindle, mutilate, and accelerate that stuff as it passes through that region of space. So there’s the problem of the photon ramrod effect. You could solve that with graduated buffer folds, which is a procedure we already use for busy areas of space. But it would take a lot of energy to set up that many buffers.”

  “This doesn’t tell me how we fall prey to time dilation.”

  “Even with the white drive, we’re moving through regions of space that are themselves dilated because of relativistic effects. The stuff falling into the Well is moving so fast that time has to slow down, essentially, because otherwise it would exceed c. It’s not us, in other words—it’s what we’d be folding.”

  “And that’s why the Koregoi artifact feels slow. Despite being in a bubble.”

  “Got it,” Connla said.

  “Maybe we should have stuck with the business model of leading wreck-diving tours of black hole regions,” I mused.

  Singer didn’t contradict me.

  Connla said, “We could sell it as an antisenescence treatment, too. Look twenty ans younger than your agemates when you go home for your crèche reunion!”

  I covered my face with my hand.

  “How confident are we that it’s actually a Koregoi artifact?” Connla asked.

  “If it’s ancient alien superscience, it’s pretty much by definition Koregoi,” I answered. “And it’s parked inside a black hole, did you notice?”

  Singer said, “Another option is using your contact with the artifact to nudge it—white bubble and all—out of a parked orbit and into a location where it would get kicked out by one of the Well’s relativistic jets. Because the Saga-star is so big, and because it imparts so much energy to what it’s sucking in, the angular momentum that stuff gains is enormous, and for any of it to fall in at all, a lot of it has to be ejected to remove momentum for the system. We could use that to push the artifact out of the Well, like a little cartoon fish on a cartoon whale’s blow spout.”

  “That sounds really cool,” Connla said. “But if we do that then we have to go catch the damned thing. And it’ll be moving pretty fast, and we probably don’t have the acceleration to do that in normal space.”

  “That’s sort of sad,” I said.

  “It is. If we don’t have another option, though, it might be worth trying.”

  “I have another option,” I said.

  Connla looked at me, and I imagined I felt Singer’s attention shift to focus on me more completely, though of course that was projection. But I could also feel the sleepy presence of the Koregoi ship, and I thought that as long as I was doing impossible things I could probably control it remotely.

  “What we can do,” I said, “is add energy to the system.”

  “Raise its orbit,” Connla said.

  “Change the orientation of the A-WD field, and increase the density of the folding and stretching at its edges, and bring it out—boom—like an air bubble rising through water under gravity. It’ll come out STL, even—then all we have to do is stop it, and retrieve it normally.”

  “Huh,” Connla said. He moved some data around on his interface. “We’d have to make sure nothing important is in front of it when it pops up, because when you take the white drive down, it’ll make one hell of a particle cannon.”

  “Can you take the white drive down remotely?”

  “I don’t see why not,” I said. Then I cleared my throat. “I mean, assuming I can get control of the vessel at all.”

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  I didn’t get control of the vessel.

  Control might be a questionable word here anyway.

  I got access, though—or a connection. I wasn’t managing to communicate with it, exactly, or offer it commands, though my Koregoi senso seemed to auto-tune to it and give me at least that much connection. It wasn’t responsive, though. I could just feel it waiting out there, big and passive, like somebody breathing but not talking on the other end of a com connection.

  A little creepy, really.

  Singer tried using some of the stuff he’d learned about talking to—or at least tuning into the signals from—my Koregoi senso. He didn’t seem to be making much headway either. And—we were assuming the thing was a ship, but it could have been just about anything in there. At least it was something and we hadn’t come all this way for an empty wrinkle in space-time.

  Maybe we should go wreck-diving. Hell, the Synarche might be gone in two thousand ans. Then we wouldn’t have to worry about selective service.

  Resupply, on the other hand—sure, that might be a problem.

  The next step seemed to be trial and error. On my part, and on Singer’s. He piggybacked on my signal, poking around in there, and when I tried to ask him what he was actually doing I got a string of programming jargon that was so far beyond me it might as well have been one of those twelve-tone semi-ultrasonic methane-breather languages that shatter ice crystals and sound like a glass harmonica having a bad dia at work.

  We were having some effect, though, or I was fooling myself into believing we were, because it felt like the contact was deepening and clarifying. The result, subconsciously, was like somebody looking at you while waiting for you to finish saying something really dumbass. Or maybe I was just feeling self-conscious by then.

  I still wasn’t managing to communicate, though—and I didn’t feel like anything was changing in a hurry. In fact, I was about to suggest to Singer that he carry on, piggybacked on my senso, while I got a sandwich and took a nap.

  Just as I was formulating the offer, the alien object—inside its white bubble—smoothly and incrementally began to move.

  Toward us.

  “Whoa,” I said, my pulse accelerating. “Singer, did you do that?”

  “I was just about to ask you the same thing. What did you do?”

  “I don’t know!”

  “Well, keep doing it! It’s working!”

  The object rose out of the Well like a freight elevator, its bubble a little itch or snag in my Koregoi awareness. It was slow, to start. Painfully slow, on a scale where even Singer’s actuarial expectancy of conscious existence might not be enough to let him see its journey ended.

  For a while, I wondered if it would have the capability—or the fuel—to fold space-time fast and hard enough to pull itself out of something like the Well. As far as I knew, this was a thing that had never been attempted. When we had access to a real library, I should check out if anybody had probed these depths with remote drones, or if we were making scientific history here.

  I’d anchored myself by my afthands to a rail and was watching with tight breath, hunger and tiredness forgotten—or tuned out by Singer, which was nearly the same. The anomaly accelerated, hoving toward us, not actually moving itself because the space inside its white bubble was stationary. But the space around the white bubble was scrunching up before and unscrunching behind like an inchworm on a
mphetamines.

  Pretty soon, it was coming so fast I could barely believe it. I tried not to think too hard about the fact that the Koregoi senso was apparently letting me feel what was happening light-minutes away at an instantaneous rate of return. These ancestor-systers could manipulate space-time in such a way as to create localized, artificial gravity. What was a little spooky action at a distance to them?

  The black hole time dilation kept being obvious, and that made me re-realize just how fast the anomaly had to be moving, because . . . well, it was way down in the Well, and from its perspective, we were living very fast indeed right now in our perch on the rim.

  Singer eventually kicked me out of my own senso and forced me to eat something and have a nap. He kept working on trying to communicate with the ship. Apparently he didn’t need me awake for that, so I stayed out of his way.

  Space is big, and even at ludicrous rates of speed, crossing chunks of it takes a long time.

  While the Koregoi artifact swam its way to the surface against the current of space-time, the Synarche ships closed on us. We held a brief conference about what to do when they got there.

  “Turn me over,” Singer said definitively. “Explain everything, ask them to corroborate with Goodlaw Cheeirilaq, bask in the glory of having retrieved what appears for the time being to be a fully functional Koregoi ship, and see if you can somehow get in on the study team.”

  “I’m not an academic,” Connla said. “I’ll have to find a gig.”

  I held my tongue. I wished I could have managed to be more excited about the unprecedented thing we’d discovered. But I didn’t want to be an academic. I really didn’t want to be an experimental subject.

  And I didn’t want to be stuck in the crowded Core.

  But I also really didn’t think they’d be letting me just wander off anywhere with a hide full of Koregoi tech that could sense dark gravity, create artificial gravity, and manipulate the curves of space-time. I was going to get drafted into Synarche service for a term of at least a few ans as soon as they got here, right alongside Singer.