Ancestral Night

by Elizabeth Bear

  Feeling . . . continuity. Feeling like you existed as a real, solid thing, apart from your trauma.

  Did other people have this? And not just a set of rules and chemical settings, tunings and rightminding, that they’d decided bounded the parameters of their actions?

  It explained some things about people’s behavior. And their defensiveness surrounding certain antisocial aspects of their personalities.

  I had never really felt like I existed apart from the clade, and apart from Niyara. The person I was now was Judicially constructed. Who was I really?

  “Haimey?” Singer said. “Are you all right?”

  “Sad,” I admitted.

  “I can sense that. Should you bump?”

  “No!” I made myself jump with my own vehemence. “Sorry. I mean, no, it’s natural sadness. Earned. I’m going to miss being a team with Connla and you. And I’m going to miss the cats.”

  “It might not be permanent,” Singer said.

  “I know. But I can’t hold on to that.”

  That was the future. And the future was gone.

  “I know.” A pause; then he said, “I’m putting together the beginnings of a schematic, if you want to explore a little bit more.”

  “Nah,” I said. “My afthands hurt. I think I’m just going to lie down here and watch the Synarche come.”

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  I made myself comfortable on the decking and propped my ankles on a little bump in the floor. The gravity shifted directions there, so it felt like my lower extremities were floating, which helped with the pain relief. It was awfully weird, experiencing space as up, and anyway craning against gravity was doing a number on my neck by then.

  The little ships grew until they were as big as Singer, then bigger. They were still farther away than he was, which gave me a pretty good indication of their size. We’d offered no indication of lack of cooperation, but they weren’t taking any chances that we might hit a bout of independence or antisocialism or just plain sophipathology and light out for the territories in the archaeological discovery of the century. And to be honest, if we’d had a better idea of how to make it go, I might have done just that.

  Also, I bet most of them wanted to be in on the adventure. Every syster within striking distance would want a taste of and a claim on this discovery. And even putting materialistic and status motives aside, how would you ever live it down with your great-great-grand-nestlings if you passed up the opportunity to be present at a piece of history like this?

  “How many of them are there?” I asked Singer.

  “Twenty-three,” he answered.

  “Wow,” Connla said. “I can’t remember the last time I felt this important.”

  “Oh,” I said. “I bet you had a line around the block to ask you to dance at your graduation ball.”

  He snorted. “I’m not that much younger than you, old lady.”

  Actually, he was a few ans older. But I let it slide.

  I thought about my breathing, and found a kind of peace. Melancholy but not miserable. I’d probably cry myself to sleep for ages, and every time I saw a cat, if I didn’t tune, but I could survive this.

  I would survive this. I would stay friends with Connla and Singer, because there was no reason not to.

  And I would go on to have new adventures, besides.

  The Synarche ships were coasting to a matched velocity, and I was feeling . . . not exactly good about the galaxy, but at least not catastrophic. Singer’s tug turned, moving back to allow them in toward the Koregoi vessel . . .

  . . . and exploded into a thousand flaring firework sparks.

  CHAPTER 16

  I CHOKED IN DISBELIEF, AND CLUTCHED my throat—or my suit, over where it felt like my throat was closing. The sparks spread, dying quickly as they ran out of oxidant, already beginning to fall into orbit as they felt the powerful draw of the Well. A cloud of vapor puffed into void and froze, sparkling as the flakes of oxygen and carbon dioxide and nitrogen and water vapor turned, expanding and tumbling with the momentum of decompression.

  Larger chunks of what had been a ship broke apart, trailing cables and linkages and sparkling sprays of debris. I saw a big piece of the aft hull—identifiable by the stump of a derrick—blown off at a high rate of speed, tumbling end over end.

  “Singer!” I choked on it, but I got it out.

  No answer.

  Singer. Connla.

  The cats.

  Ice spiked through me, a moment of sheer panic, and then my own body clarified the adrenaline rush and settled me into a perfect, terrible calm. No tuning needed; this was the atavistic survival response in a situation for which it had evolved, through millions of ans of trial and error where the errors got you eaten.

  “Connla?”

  Reaching out into the senso toward where he should have been felt like trying to grab a rope with an amputated hand. I had no coms, and access only to the fox in my wetware; no uplink at all. And looking at the sky overhead, I didn’t think there would be an answer.

  I had a pretty good view of what remained of Singer . . . and it wasn’t promising. A sparking hulk turned in space, white coils snapped into an arc and unraveling like a sliced, fraying segment of hose. The tug was dark except for the silent sizzle of electricity, already fading. There would be electron beams I couldn’t see, invisible because they were bridging gaps in vacuum, in addition to the blue and green and yellow arcs formed where there was something made of atoms for the electricity to excite.

  The other Synarche ships were there. Within sight now. I could try to reach them. I had to try to reach them, although with nothing but my naked suit com, broadcasting from inside the Koregoi prize . . .

  Let’s just say I didn’t fancy my chances.

  But other than those Synarche vessels, I was completely alone, and I had no idea if Singer had informed them that he had crew aboard the salvaged vessel before he . . . before the explosion.

  What had happened to Singer? What the Well could have gone so terribly wrong? There had been no sign that the Koregoi ship was taking any automated action. I hadn’t felt any tremor though the hull, as if a mass driver had been activated, and there had been no visible trace of energy weapon. A ship built by people who could manipulate gravity at a whim might have other weapons, though—weapons out of fantasy, repulsor rays and rattlers.

  I realized that I wasn’t lying down anymore. That somehow, without realizing it, I had rolled upright and run to the arched dome of the observation pod.

  I leaned on the transparent shell and looked around for something that I could jury-rig to in order to make an antenna. That simple tech; a pre-space juvenile could build one with a bit of wire. I just needed something conductive that extended into the outside, or that connected to something else conductive that likewise extended.

  The adrenaline was wearing off, and behind it came the grief and horror I didn’t have time to feel, slicking up my palms and eyes. I shut it down, tuned harder than was possibly safe, knowing that if I pushed myself as hard as I needed to it was likely to destabilize my brain chemistry for diar unless I spent a long, careful time coming down off the bump I was giving myself. Dumping a lot of brain chemicals into yourself abruptly tends to send the system into wild spins. And I wasn’t as good at tuning this stuff as . . .

  . . . as some people.

  I got myself together with a couple of deep breaths and didn’t look at my air gauge. There was plenty of atmosphere in the Koregoi ship if the option became breathing it, or suffocating. Then I began quartering the edge of the dome, looking for something I could use to boost a signal.

  It was all smooth and organic, as if the damned bubble had grown there.

  After a few minutes, I looked up, frustrated, to judge the position of the Synarche ships. I froze, horrified, as I realized that they were pulling away. There was no external sign of their trajectory—no flare of a chemical burn—as they were operating off the EM drive. But they were definitely backing off. Leaving me alo
ne in here.

  It made sense, of course. It was the safe and sensible thing to do. Something had just destroyed Si—destroyed the tug, destroyed the tug, dammit—and the smart money would have bet on the source of that aggressive action being the Koregoi vessel we’d just dragged up from the abyss of deep time.

  The Synarche ships had approached cautiously. Now they were hightailing it back to a more respectful distance at maximum a, hanging v on their survey ships like garlands. I didn’t blame them; I just wished I was out there with them. Or better yet, that all of us were.

  Stop thinking about Singer.

  Half of a tug turned in space. Another piece had blown away, and I could not locate it now. It was conceivable that somebody had survived in there. In an airlock or a safety pod. If they were suited up already. It was conceivable.

  Sure it was.

  I shook my head in awe at how screwed I was, and started thinking about what I could do for food, once I tried the air and it didn’t kill me—which was going to be a little while yet, in any case. There was a lot of ship to explore, and the Synarche ships would be back. Staying alive . . . Well, you could go a long time without food. Water that I could be sure was safe, and oxygen, however—each need was orders of magnitudes more urgent than the one before.

  I leaned my head back and blinked through another flush of tears. Then threw myself back away from the observation dome in a comically useless reflex as something swept through the tiny—in space terms—gap between Singer and the Koregoi ship.

  You can’t see a ship in white space. In the normal course of events, you can just barely detect it with gravitometric sensors, though that becomes easier if it’s not moving. Or more precisely, not folding your region of space past its stationary location at a really incomprehensible rate of something that functionally mimics speed.

  It turned out that I could sense a ship in white space pretty well now, though. Or at least, the Koregoi senso could. And my reflexes had opinions about large things moving extremely fast near the fragile soap-bubble of an observation dome.

  A few moments after the gut-twisting blur of a ship in white space, I sensed something even more unnerving. A faint impact rang through the Koregoi ship—easy to sense because I happened to be in close contact with it, by which I mean sprawled flat and trying to catch my breath for the second time that dia.

  Something—something not terribly big or extremely fast-moving, but with enough momentum to send a shiver through the vessel—had just struck the hull.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  I froze for a moment, hunched in an ancient mammalian cringe posture—chin tucked, shoulders popped around my ears like epaulets, forehands half-raised. Waiting for the next explosion, the one I would hear and feel instead of seeing at a distance, in a position that would do absolutely nothing to protect me from it.

  Won’t have to worry about starving to death, I thought.

  And then I . . . didn’t die.

  A few more moments went by, and I didn’t die some more.

  I peeled myself out of my defensive crouch. Centimeter by centimeter, I straightened. I looked around, aware that if I had been on a station, I’d be a good candidate for that dia’s monitor follies programming right about now.

  Isn’t it amazing how you can be embarrassed as anything even when nobody’s looking? If I were a cat, I would have been washing my ears. Except for the helmet being in the way, of course.

  Not being dead, I tried to feel my way into the ship’s senso again. It felt . . . echoing, empty in there without Singer. But I persisted. Nothing like work to aid compartmentalization, right?

  I let my awareness filter into the ship’s sensor network, like ink diluting into water. It was surprisingly easy—more a matter of relaxing my boundaries than pushing through a membrane. It seemed to work better, actually, when I let go of my intentionality and just let the Koregoi senso handle the transition itself. I had a sort of proprioception, as if the ship were an extension of my nervous system.

  The ship was a great hollow shape, its drives quiescent but waiting, its spaces full of secrets I would have to explore if I wanted to have a chance of surviving until the Core ships decided it was safe to come back. If it was safe to come back.

  Was it safe to come back?

  I was paying more attention to my planning than to what I was feeling through the ship, so I was utterly blindsided when the quivering tendrils of my sensibility, so to speak, brushed up against an unexpected, and unexpectedly familiar, human presence. And not a welcome one. I snapped back into myself in shock and dismay. Well, additional dismay—I already had plenty, but now I had an even more immediate problem than possibly pathogenic atmosphere and a soon to be pressing need for hydration.

  It was a greedy, grabbing awareness, and when I brushed it I recoiled as it snatched after me.

  It was Farweather. And she was on the ship with me. And she knew I was here.

  The projectile that struck the Koregoi hull had been a pirate.

  My pirate. Or the pirate who wanted to collect me, which I suppose amounts to the same thing.

  I froze as if under the shadow of a predator’s wings. I needed to escape. Viscerally, out of the kind of instinctive, atavistic sense of self-preservation that—if you don’t answer it—results in crippling anxiety or blind panic. My heart rate accelerated, and for a long moment I just stood listening to it, feeling my pulse tremble in my fingertips so hard they seemed to pulse against the inside of my suit. I was too terrified even to scream.

  Do something, said a voice in my head that didn’t sound like my own. Do something, do something, do something—

  Do what, though?

  After what seemed like a half an, I realized who I was pleading with, and what I had been waiting for. And that Singer wasn’t coming to rescue me this time, or to tweak my brain just enough to make me functional again.

  I was in the stage of panic where it’s hard to do anything. Hard to make decisions, because they all seem like they will end in catastrophe. What if I tuned wrong? What if I made myself too calm, and I didn’t react appropriately to the threat? My attitude jets were misaligned, and all I was succeeding in doing was burning fuel and just spinning myself in circles.

  So that was the first thing to fix, if I wanted to live. Calm the hell down, Dz. Thinking the command to myself alone was enough to release me from the paralysis, and I managed to tune myself to something more like a functional state of hyperarousal and settle in. Tuning myself always made me nervous—too easy to check right out of reality, if you got too reliant on it, and never worry about whether your decisions were smart or ambitious, when you could just turn off feeling weird about them later.

  That was how I justified letting—making—Singer do most of the work, and why I always made sure there were strict time limits on his interventions. But I didn’t have Singer now, and panic paralysis over that fact wasn’t helping me.

  I turned down my grief, too. There would be time for it later, and I knew I would have to experience it, because even with rightminding, experiences repressed and unexperienced lead to a series of sophipathologies. Anxiety being one of them.

  The last thing I really needed was more anxiety.

  I reached back into my fox for the precise memories of what it had felt like when Farweather struck the hull. Could I use the sense of impact, possibly combined with that weird proprioception, to determine where she was? Where she might be gaining entry to the ship? Where she was now, in relation to me?

  Could I hide, or fight, or set up an ambush?

  Probably, I thought. Yes, probably. I didn’t touch her awareness again, but I reached out gently, trying to sense her weight in space without actually making contact with her. I was pretty sure that if she had a sense of my whereabouts, she would be heading for me. Was she able to feel me taking up space in the universe, the same way I could sometimes feel her? Could I hide myself somehow? It was a big, labyrinthine ship. If I could make it so that she couldn’t feel me, did s
he stand much of a chance of fighting me?

  Well, who knew what technology the Freeporters had, or had stolen. She might have a really good infrared imager, for all I knew. I thought about the chances for an ambush. I didn’t know the ship well—at all, really—which was a major drawback. Also the fact that Farweather and I shared a weird alien kind of senso did seem to make it unlikely that I could hide myself from her with any accuracy. Although, honestly, it was hard to guess what she could or couldn’t do. If it was possible to hide ourselves from each other very well—

  Well, wouldn’t she be doing it?

  Maybe. Or she might be trying to stampede me. It was impossible to know.

  Right. So I needed to be on the move, and I needed to be on the move in whatever direction she was neither coming from, nor heading. And I needed to conceal myself from her, if that was possible, or alternately I needed to make it too risky or dangerous for her to come after me.

  I was, I realized, afraid of her. Not just in the adversary sense. Not just in the sense that here was a person who was stalking me. No, I was afraid of Zanya Farweather, pirate, in and of her own self.

  Why?

  Well, she was kind of a badass, for one thing.

  And then, she reminded me of my ex.

  Not physically. But in a sense of presence, and something—a rogue something, an edgy something that might be just a disdain for social norms—that my unrightminded self found ineluctably compelling.

  She was trouble. And I liked trouble.

  That’s my problem. I always have.

  I imagined Singer saying Your bad girl problem is a problem, girl. It broke my heart a little, but this time thinking about Singer got me moving. Paying attention a little more. Going forward.

  I was walking, and I was headed for the door. Companionway. Whatever.

  When I realized that I’d actually managed to start moving, I kicked up my adrenaline a notch and gave myself a fuel boost and began to run. It hurt my afthands (sooo not designed for this), but I shut the pain off as an inconvenience. Either I’d survive this, in which case I could look into fixing anything I’d busted, or they’d wind up infected inside my suit and I’d probably die of gas gangrene.