Ancestral Night

by Elizabeth Bear

And I needed somebody to help me take revenge for the way I was raised.

  Because I couldn’t move, and because my head was still fogged and sore, eventually I slept again.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  “Haimey, wake up,” she said. “You need to get up. You need to eat, and you need to bring me calories.”

  Niyara, leave me alone.

  I rolled over and tried to keep sleeping. The rolling over went better than previous attempts at movement, and I risked opening my eyes. My head hurt, still, but it wasn’t the sickening pain of before. Not Niyara.

  Farweather.

  “What did you do to me?” I whined.

  She sighed. “EM pulse, as I have told you approximately seventy-five times. I wiped your fox.”

  “You fried my white matter,” I said. I blinked. The world seemed less tunnely and dark at the edges than the last time I’d tried this.

  “There’s not supposed to be any permanent damage,” she said. “But right now you need to eat, and so do I.”

  I tried to sit up, very slowly. I felt like I’d lost a lot of blood, and I wondered how I knew what losing that much blood felt like. “What happened to me?” I said.

  “Haimey,” Farweather said, with infinite patience. “Go over there and get the pack with the empanadas in it, would you? And a couple more bulbs of electrolyte drink.”

  I tried to stand up. It didn’t work; I made it to a crouch and fell over. I lay there for a little while until Farweather made me get up on my hands and knees.

  “Go over there and get two empanadas, and two bulbs of electrolyte drink.”

  I made it to the packs. She waited behind me, rattling her chain impatiently like a ghost of old guilt issues. I couldn’t find the pack with the food in it. Eventually she guided me there, and after a couple of false starts I made it back to her and brought her a cold stuffed dumpling in a sterile, shelf-stable vacpac and a bulb of electrolytes, sugar, and water. Apparently I had been supposed to get one for myself, as well, and she woke me up and made me go back over.

  Because she kept waking me up, I managed to get the food and the hydration inside me. Then I went back to sleep, because I was no better at maintaining a train of thought than any drunk person, and besides my head still hurt abominably.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  I guess it was probably a couple of diar before I started being able to hold a conversation again, and by then I really didn’t want to. Because I was starting to remember things when I was awake, not just when I was asleep—and not just which pack the empanadas were kept in.

  Neural pathways are pretty well established, and I’d been wearing a fox since before puberty: external rig until my brain reached adult size, and then they’d done the transcranial surgery. They start us younger in the clades: not so much time to develop ideas of our own that way. Ideas of our own, such as might lead to discontent and unhappiness.

  It would be terrible to be unhappy.

  So I kept reaching reflexively for my machine capabilities—memory, processing, math, tuning—and finding nothing there. No response. In addition, my symptoms included cognitive and attention issues. I couldn’t hold a thought. I couldn’t accomplish a task without being distracted. And I couldn’t keep my temper at all.

  I was utterly deregulated, in other words.

  If Farweather was telling me the truth, I had been fuzzily conscious for about three standard hours. Then I’d slept a lot, which—honestly—I continued to do as I slowly recovered. I don’t think she’d expected my body’s response to her gadget to be so extreme. But if they’d tested it—or modeled it, which I figured was more likely—they hadn’t tested or modeled it on people who had grown up in a clade, or had significant Judicial Recon.

  I think I’d actually worried her. At least, she’d acted concerned. Which was either a glimpse of a softer side of her, or a symptom that the Stockholmification was working. Or maybe just recognition that she couldn’t reach the food without me.

  Please tell me I’ve got some kind of a chance to get out of this.

  There was no answering banter.

  I felt even more hollow than I had. I knew the voice I had been imagining for company wasn’t really Singer; I hadn’t lost that much contact with reality. I knew it was just me talking to myself, giving myself a little bit of comfort here and there. I knew I’d just been playing his role in my head; still, it had been nice to pretend he was in there somewhere.

  Now I couldn’t hear it anymore. And the absence left me so profoundly lonely that it was a physical ache in my chest and belly.

  There were other aches, too. There was the sense of something having been ripped from me; that heartbroken punch of loss without any memories to explain where it was coming from. And there was the neuralgic pain that tended to spike through my body unexpectedly, flaring and fading almost as fast again.

  My afthands developed the habit of cramping in very awkward positions. Some of the fine motor control for those fingers and thumbs had been processed through my fox, too. Now I was also going to have to learn to do that the hard way.

  That was when I salvaged the backup voice recorder—the black box—out of my space suit and started keeping a voice diary. Because I couldn’t make backups, and I had no access to an ayatana. And if something happened to me—who was I kidding, something had already happened to me—I wanted to leave behind some kind of a record. Some kind of evidence. I made notes of everything that had happened since we found the murdered Ativahika. And I made notes of my conversations with Farweather, and what I found on the ship.

  It helped me deal with the feelings, too. Talking them out. Even if it was only to a recorder.

  As the dia went by, I slowly got back some control. And with the control, the shadows of memories I hadn’t considered in ans—that perhaps I had not been permitted to consider in ans?—began emerging.

  They were terrible, and I didn’t want to think about them. Didn’t want to remember the nightmares that emerged from under conflicting, and safer (though still terrible) memories.

  It was as if two different versions of reality coexisted in my head at the same time. There was the story of Niyara and me, of her betrayal, the one that I’d polished and kept in my pocket all these ans in order to ward off unwise personal attachments.

  And then there was the contradictory one, starting to assert itself, like a history from a parallel universe.

  And it was so much more terrible than the first.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Zanya was washing her hair. And I was watching the networks of tiny glistening particles swirl across her skin as she knelt over the basin of water I’d brought her. She was rinsing soap out and squeezing the last clear droplets from the black strands.

  We both spent a good amount of time doing calisthenics and body weight exercises, because it was a long, boring trip and we didn’t have a lot to keep us busy. My joints hurt, but it was fascinating how easy gravity made exercise. She was getting more muscular, under the effects of all this gravity, and it was happening even more dramatically to me.

  I also spent a good amount of time trying not to stare at her. And then trying not to get caught staring when I inevitably failed.

  She didn’t seem to care when I did. If anything, she looked smug about it when she noticed. As for me—well, there’s a reason I had my sexuality turned off after Niyara. I have terrible taste in women. And Zanya, being an awful human being, was exactly the kind of terrible that was just to my taste.

  And now my fox was fried, and my external self-control was wiped as well.

  You’re a grownup now, I told myself. You know better.

  I did.

  It didn’t comfort me, honestly, because Hester Prynne knew better too, and look where that got her.

  It would be different if I could rely on my rightminding, on my fox, to keep me going. But all I had were the stirrings in my loins and my own unpracticed self-control, neither of which were doing me any favors currently.

  I had my memo
ries, too. My slowly evolving memories, with their freight of guilt and revelation, were not helpful. They made me want to find distractions. Things to bury myself in.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  “You’re staring,” Zanya said without lifting her head. She flexed her shoulders. “Like what you see?”

  I watched the patterns of light sparkle across her back. “That has to make it harder to sneak up on people.”

  She shrugged. More muscles, more rippling. More sparkles, like glitter flowing in water under moving lights. “You tell me.”

  “I don’t sneak up on people.”

  She chuckled and rattled her chain.

  “. . . not professionally.”

  She sat up, reaching for her dirty shirt to dry her hair.

  When she’d wrapped it up, I handed her a clean one, because watching her wriggle into it was less distracting than staring at her breasts. My hormones had made up for their hiatus by reasserting themselves with adolescent ferocity.

  And I’m getting these damned things turned off again the instant I can.

  “Why did you say you had no options about going back to the Freeports?”

  She sat down on her improvised mattress, which crackled under her weight. “That’s easy,” she said. “If I don’t go back, the explosives packed along my spine will detonate. I’ll die, and I’ll probably blow a hole in the hull of this nice old ship, and that would be a pity for both of us, wouldn’t it?”

  I shuddered.

  She’d mentioned this before. But not in such graphic terms. And I’d had a box in my head that kept me from feeling what she described quite so viscerally unless I wanted to.

  She was a walking time bomb. As with Niyara . . . quite literally.

  My type of woman. Damn it to the Well.

  Conversationally, she said, “You know, I do still have Niyara’s ayatana.”

  “Sure you do,” I said.

  She shrugged.

  “If you have that, what do you need my information for?”

  “You’ve got a key inside you, and you don’t even know it.”

  I strained against the fuzziness and fog that still infected me. “Your random number string.”

  “Not random.”

  “What does it have to do with that book Niyara gave me?”

  Her lips curved in a smile.

  “At least tell me what you’re gloating about.”

  “Maybe if you help us out.”

  “Why’s that book so important?”

  “Why’d you keep it all this time? Especially given what Niyara did to you. And what you thought she did to you.”

  That was an excellent question. And the answer was, I had to. “I had to,” I said. And wished I hadn’t.

  “Because it was buried in your brain—in your fox—somewhere that you had to.”

  “If that was in there, the Recon would have found it out and Judicial would have taken the book.”

  “Not if the command predated Niyara.”

  I blinked at her. “You’re saying my clade put it there?”

  “I’m saying you weren’t rebelling against your clade when you worked with her. You thought you were. But you were following their program all along.”

  “I can’t handle this,” I said.

  I walked away.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  I kind of wished she’d call after me, give me an excuse not to go.

  She didn’t. So I stayed away for a good long time.

  When I came back, I brought fresh water. I even gave her a drink.

  She didn’t ask where I had been. She emptied the cup and set it down and then looked up at me. “Are you ready to resume that conversation?”

  “Fuck you,” I said.

  “Ah.” She steepled her fingers. “Well, as I recall, when you left you had asked me what might be in your head that I could want.”

  “It’s a book code,” I said. I’d had a lot of time to think about it, and while they were archaic and unused and hardly anybody even knew about them anymore, book codes were the only reason I could think of that you would need a particular edition of a particular book . . . and a string of numbers. “But the book is gone. You blew it up. So can we just stop . . . playing whatever game this is?”

  “You get high marks,” she said. “That’s half of it. Niyara left you information you didn’t know you had, and that’s one reason we wanted you. But that’s not the most important one.”

  I sat down on my mattress and sighed. I rummaged in the supplies, added water to a pack of rice, and triggered the heating unit. Space nori was pretty good on rice.

  “All you need for that is the book. And the book is gone.”

  Apparently Farweather was going to keep talking no matter what. “But the information you have, Haimey. Your own memories. Even though you don’t entirely know it. That information is so much more valuable to us than whatever Niyara gave you in a code. She couldn’t put maps in a book code, and anyway she wouldn’t hide that from us.” She grinned. “Besides, I’m the one who knows how to get into this ship’s databases. Thanks to your family and your ex.”

  I grunted. “A clade is not a family.”

  She waved it away airily. “Let’s just say that we have reason to believe that some of what’s locked up inside your head—the real history of Niyara, et al—is so sensitive that it seems likely that the Synarche would probably be willing to grant us certain concessions in order to keep it from being spread around. Undermining their moral authority.”

  I stared at her.

  “Moral authority is pretty much what they operate on, so—” She shrugged.

  “You think there’s something so awful in my memories that you can use it to blackmail the entire Synarche?”

  “Yep,” she said.

  “What?” It was bad enough what she’d done to me; how she’d violated me again and again. Setting up the booby trap that had injected me with this atrocity tech, the Koregoi senso. And then destroying my fox, my machine memories, everything that made me . . . me. The me I wanted to be.

  She said, “Your guess is as good as mine, honestly. I’m just the guy with the EM gun; I’m not a psychospecialist.”

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  The worst was when I retired to my secret nest in the maintenance tube to float, and sleep, and be alone.

  There were no distractions in my nest, which had appealed to me before Farweather blew up my emotional regulation. Now it just meant that there was nothing to hold or focus my attention. I was restless. Feverish. The feeling of being ungrounded and unable to follow a mental thread was relentless. I couldn’t think, couldn’t reason. I certainly couldn’t sleep reliably, or for long.

  So I hung in my tube and drifted lightly on the end of my tether, trying not to fidget lest I put myself into a wobbling spin.

  It was all so deeply frustrating, and there was so little I could come up with to remedy the situation. It was possible that stimulants might aid my concentration, but the strongest thing I had access to was Farweather’s limited coffee supply, and we were rationing that. I’d cut her off, actually; more for me. It seemed like the least I could manage in terms of consequences, considering what she’d done to me.

  I tried mindfulness, along with some other primitive rightminding techniques I’d heard of or read about or studied, back when I was still studying history. They helped a little, though the level of effort on return was pretty high. But they did not help enough. Whenever my concentration on my breathing (this is my in breath; this is my out breath) lapsed, my thoughts went skying off in every possible direction. And when I managed to rein them back from flying to the next thing, and the thing after that, and the next thing too, they fixated obsessively on history.

  Not galactic history, either. But my own personal history. The ugly kind.

  As I already mentioned, we were on a date when Niyara blew up.

  Actually blew up. Literally on a date.

  That part is true. Or anyway, I remembered it as true now, w
ithout the mediation of my machine memory. Though of course it was possible that long exposure to my fox’s version of events had changed my own recollections. It was not true that we had fought, but we had parted company and then met at that cafe in the outer ring of Ansara Station.

  Some things hadn’t changed. I was, indeed, supposedly on my Choice An, supposedly getting a glimpse of the outside universe before I made my final decision to stay with the clade. The opportunity to change my mind was legally mandated by the Synarche, of course. I couldn’t commit entirely to the clade until I turned twenty-five standard, and I had to do it, legally, while I wasn’t under the influence of any tuning or rightminding controlled by the clade.

  Ansara was the biggest human habitation I had ever visited, at the time, and the also first I’d ever been to with a significant percentage of nonhuman systers in residence. That isn’t saying much, because I’d grown up on the station entirely populated by the women of Nyumba Yangu Haina Mlango, and I’d stopped at a grand total of two transfer points or waystations on my way to Ansara, which I had chosen because . . .

  . . . because . . .

  I opened my eyes and stared into the darkness of the maintenance tube. It wasn’t very dark darkness. One of the things I’d noticed was that, in addition to all my weird new secondary senses relating to gravity and mass and so forth, my eyes were becoming better adapted to seeing under a variety of light conditions.

  A less beneficial side effect, under the current conditions of tight rationing, was that I was hungry all the time and had started losing weight again, though the algae tanks kept Farweather and me from actually starving.

  But I was distracting myself from thinking about Ansara. Ansara, which I had chosen to go to for my Choice An because . . .

  I couldn’t remember. There had been a logical process, I was sure. A reason to go there. Museums? A chance to study? It had a pretty good technical program.

  No, I realized, as a second set of memories unveiled itself, coexisting alongside the first like some weird double exposure of the mind. I hadn’t decided to go to Ansara. I’d been sent—or at least, the decision had been made for me, though at the time I’d accepted it as my own.

  My own clade had set me up. Farweather was not lying about that.