Ancestral Night

by Elizabeth Bear

  He shrugged. “Why didn’t you mention how you were feeling?”

  “Because it’s feelings,” I said. “And feelings are terrible. Also I didn’t want to guilt-trip you.”

  “Right,” he said. “Me either.” He looked out the window. “Feelings are terrible.”

  But I could see the reflection of his smile in the glass.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  We docked and lugged the cats on board the Koregoi ship, through the blasted gravity. All that gravity. I hadn’t missed it a bit. The cats objected pretty strenuously to the whole concept, and the complaints started as soon as we brought their carriers off the launch.

  Well, in all honesty, they hadn’t exactly taken to the launch’s acceleration kindly, either.

  When Mephistopheles and Bushyasta were safely ensconced in our makeshift control cabin slash throbbing nerve center of the salvaged ship, and crews of constables were busy bringing over supplies, Connla and I set out to learn where the controls for the artificial gravity were. And how to adjust them. If we couldn’t turn the gravity off, maybe we could at least turn it down to something a little more manageable. That seemed like a better option anyway, given that the Koregoi vessel was not optimized to be navigated in free fall.

  Considering that we had two irritable felines attempting to impersonate tortillas on the deck, and a low-grav Goodlaw who couldn’t wait to join the crew—and considering that my cartilage had been compressing at an alarming rate and that I was already centimeters shorter than when I’d come on board, figuring the gravity out seemed like the most urgent use of our time.

  Singer was an enormous help, once he and Connla finished up the inevitable tearful reunion. All right, in complete honesty, it wasn’t nearly as tearful as my reunion with Connla and the cats had been. But in my defense, Connla wasn’t recently deregulated. And he did show a lot of the tenderer emotions, for him at least.

  Singer was still locked out of a bunch of the ship, which was both fantastic news and Farweather’s doing. And she seemed to be doing something to keep me from tracking her through the Koregoi senso. Possibly the same thing I was doing to keep her guessing about where I was.

  The ship was big—confirmed!—but it wasn’t that large. We had a rough idea of where she might be, but that was based on a map of the places Singer could not access, and of course if she was really clever she’d block whatever places she could and then convince the ship’s sensors to ignore her and build a nest somewhere else. I didn’t know that she could do that. But I didn’t know she couldn’t, either. And finding one rogue human concealed in the kilometers of twisty tunnels and chambers and corridors and crawlways and closets and tubes that made up the Prize’s habitable interior spaces was beyond the immediate capabilities of any of us. Even the AI.

  We resorted, at last, to setting constables to patrolling in pairs on a random pattern, while we ourselves searched for the source of the artificial gravity through the simple and somewhat ridiculous measure of having me walk through the ship waving my hands like a charlatan with a dowsing rod looking for gold or veins of oxygen. I was feeling for what I can only describe as gravity currents. The curious thing was that they were there, and that they were definitely noticeable.

  I just followed them along until we got close to a source. It was like following the thumping of some unbalanced piece of machinery by tracing its vibrations in the bulkheads to their point of greatest intensity. And, from there, figuring out what in the Well was malfunctioning.

  Except in this case nothing was malfunctioning, obviously. And once we found the source—a machine room, similar to a dozen other machine rooms I had located over the course of my explorations—we weren’t any closer to figuring out how any of it worked.

  We were concerned with messing with it; the odds of squashing everybody on board or creating a tiny artificial black hole or some even less predictable outcome seemed pretty high if we just went in and started swapping wires around randomly. So we took a poll and decided to let Singer do it.

  Fortunately, knowing the physics behind the thing was not terribly important—to this task, at least. All we needed right now was enough access for Singer to figure out how to operate the controls.

  That took him about a standard dia, give or take a few hours. If it had been me . . . well, we would still be floating out there in space. If we weren’t smashed flat.

  It was a blissful relief when he—without fanfare—turned the gravity down. Not off, for all the reasons I mentioned before regarding the design of the ship, and also because artificial gravity was what the Prize used in lieu of acceleration couches. (And don’t ask me how that worked. I’m just a simple engineer.) But he set it low enough to be comfortable for a pack of undermuscled space rats and their feline overlords, and also low enough to make Cheeirilaq’s continued existence possible.

  While we were waiting for Singer to sort that out, and while Connla and I were making friends with the six constables who would be the body of the Prize crew (all right, he was already friends with all of them, but I’m terrible at making friends), that was when I made an even more interesting discovery.

  We were playing a Banititlan card game called tmyglick with Sergeant Halbnovalk at the time. Halbnovalk was a medic, which made her instantly my favorite crewmate.

  The game is played with a deck of 343 cards, since Banititlans have three opposable digits on one manipulator and four on the other, leaving them with the lopsided profile of a Terran lobster—and it involves aspects similar to concentration, war, and gin rummy. Anyway, I was losing badly (base seven is murder to calculate in and worse to convert from, and the senso only helps so much when you need to be building card strategies), and my mind started to wander. I was still sort of in the mode I had been in for the past dia or so, feeling after the gravitational patterns of the ship, and when I unfocused and found myself staring out the window in a meditative state of mind . . . I saw something. A kind of standing wave, or interference pattern, superimposed on the universe as if I were looking through two misaligned pieces of polarizing glass.

  When the sky outside shifted in front of me, I yelped like a stepped-on kitten.

  “Haimey?” Connla asked curiously. He, of course, was winning, because the universe hates me. The sergeant’s eyestalks lifted from their cards in polite or wary attention.

  “I just saw a pattern,” I said. I laid my cards on the table—they were terrible anyway and my hand hurt from holding so many—and I walked toward the window. “No, that’s not quite right. It’s a break in a pattern.”

  I sent what I was seeing to Connla and Halbnovalk, which was easier than answering their questions verbally. And then I leaned against the windows and stared.

  Really, that’s all I did. I stared. At the way the universe had a pattern embossed on it. And eventually, I guess I stared at it long enough that it started to make sense, and I knew what it was.

  Epiphanies are wonderful. I’m really grateful that our brains do so much processing outside the line of sight of our consciousnesses. Can you imagine how downright boring thinking would be if you had to go through all that stuff line by line?

  “Singer,” I said. He was busy, so I waited for him to acknowledge me before continuing. “Did you ever get around to decoding that book code, if that’s what it is?”

  “You still have to send me the number string.”

  Of course I did. If you’ve never been unlucky enough to catch the business end of an electromagnetic pulse to the skull, let me tell you right now: brain damage is a lot less fun to deal with when you’re hundreds of thousands of light-ans from the nearest accredited neurological medicine facility.

  “Right,” I said. “Here it comes.”

  There was a pause, though not a long one. Then Singer said, “Haimey, you need to look at this.”

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  I looked. And then we called Connla over, and went to where Cheeirilaq was nesting, and we all looked.

  When Cheeirilaq had come over j
ust a few hours before on the launch, under painstakingly gentle acceleration, Connla had been off doing important Connla things—probably flirting (or more than flirting) with one or all three of the cute human constables. Cheeirilaq had made itself at home, however, commandeering one corner of the observation deck in order to spin a web in.

  I hadn’t even been aware that its species spun webs. Seriously, is there anything in the galaxy as terrifying as an adult Rashaqin?

  We had spent the intervening time, me and the giant bug, hanging out and gossiping. Catching up. I was grateful once again to have regained access to senso; running conversations with systers through a translator would be a pain in various dorsal portions of the torso.

  It was Cheeirilaq who broke the silence, stridulating, Friend Haimey, what do you think this means?

  “Well,” I said dubiously. “It’s a lot of words.”

  It was, indeed, a lot of words. I’m not sure what I had expected to get out of a book code, other than a lot of words. But I supposed I had expected them to make sense.

  I was hoping that the archaic book code that Singer had worked out for me would, translated, tell me how to gain access to . . .

  Well, whatever would be there when we got there.

  What I had was, to all intents and purposes, a series of nouns. Nouns, verbs, and a few other parts of speech. Words that might have been useful, if I had any idea whatsoever of the context to which they applied.

  They were:

  Eschaton Artifact Water Help Teacher Thinker Learn Eat Go Take Find Destroy Use Song Mind Star Travel Need Plinth Categorical Library Memory Sing Talk Consciousness Polyhedron Beyond Before Computers Expanding Dimensions Alive Consumed Abyss Death.

  It was, I had to admit, a disappointing list. And an unsettling one. But apparently one that was worth quite a bit to the Freeporters. So I assumed it would have meant something to them. Maybe there was another layer of code underneath, and each of the words was the key to another piece of information. Maybe we had the wrong book, or the wrong numbers, or there had never been a code at all and the whole thing had been a miscommunication—or disinformation that got out of hand.

  Maybe I just didn’t have the context to make sense of the thing, and it would have meant something to Farweather. Something important.

  If so, I was glad she didn’t have it. The Eschaton Artifact, if that was what the book code was discussing—well, that didn’t sound dangerous at all.

  Or maybe it was a set of instructions that I just didn’t have the context to parse. I admit, Consumed Abyss Death was not reassuring.

  The best and most ironic part was that Farweather had put so much effort into getting her hands on me, or on the book, and between the potentially dubious scholarship of my clademothers—if Farweather could be believed, which of course she couldn’t—or whomever had translated the original source, and the limitations of a book code, and the questions I had about whether we even had the right key, I wasn’t sure it had been worth it. The map was the most important bit, and she seemed to have known where to go all along.

  Of course, if she actually did mean what she’d said about wanting to use the unfiltered contents of my memories as blackmail fodder, well. That did give her another reason to want me. And another reason for me to be glad she didn’t have me.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Singer had also worked out a projected flight plan for the Prize, and he wasn’t happy with it. He projected it for the three of us meat-types, noting that it led off into intergalactic space. Not that we were particularly surprised by that. We were discussing the possibilities when Singer broke in to say, “I am unwilling to commit to these projections.”

  So I said, “What do you mean?”

  “We have no record of any Freeport activity in this region. Standard models would suggest that there is very little likelihood of a colony here, and small reason for an outpost.”

  I stared up at the ceiling, since we had one for a change and all. I wondered if it would annoy me less when he made pronouncements like this if he were wrong occasionally. “You’re kidding me. Anyway, what if she was bringing us to the”—I winced, but there it was in the book code—“the Eschaton Artifact?”

  Eschaton is an old religious word meaning, more or less, “the final event that God has lined up for the universe.” It was used to describe the crisis in pre-white-space history that sent the first slower-than-light ships scrabbling on a one-way trip to the stars, because there were a lot of religious cultists in those diar. Of course, I didn’t think whatever this was could have had anything to do with Terra’s historic Eschaton, being most of the way across a rather large galaxy. And since a book code is limited to words actually in the book in question, Eschaton might just have been the closest thing Niyara could find to whatever the original, presumably alien, text had indicated.

  But anything advertising itself as an artifact relating to the final event in a Grand Plan made me justifiably nervous. You wouldn’t just walk up and pinch the Ragnarok Thingummy.

  Well, Farweather probably would. And she was the one who had known how to find it, unless the Prize was just taking us there automatically. What she hadn’t had, though, was the description of the object at the other end. That was what Niyara had given me, or at least given me the key to.

  That ridiculous antique printed book.

  There just aren’t any planets out here, Cheeirilaq said.

  “In that case why did Farweather drag me halfway to Andromeda? Anyway, who says it has to be a planet?”

  “It seems likely to me that there’s a well-hidden outpost out here somewhere. If I were a pirate and I were going to mass forces, I’d want to do it off the beaten track. The resources to get here are a problem, but once you’re here you’re pretty safe.” Connla, taking the strategic view.

  “That’s a good idea,” I told Connla. “But I think that’s not where we’re going.”

  The giant insect stridulated, I was wondering if you had an idea about what the destination might be.

  It cocked its head at me, segmented antennae questing forward. For a moment, it reminded me of Halbnovalk and their eyestalks, but the antennae were part of a whole different sort of sensory system, and I realized I couldn’t even probably visualize what the information they provided felt like. The Goodlaw, conversely, would probably have the same problems with my simple, noncompound eyes . . . and my ability to sense the contours of space-time, come to think of it.

  I grinned. The Goodlaw probably would not know what grinning meant, and generally savvy humans were significantly habituated not to show our teeth around systers, as so many of them were likely to interpret it as a threat display. But I just couldn’t help it—the joy, the response, was so intense that my cheek muscles contracted utterly involuntarily.

  I couldn’t resist. “We’re following a pirate map to a treasure!” I said.

  Cheeirilaq didn’t seem in the least nonplussed by my gratuitous display of natural weaponry (not, admittedly, that my blunt little nippers were likely to register as anything but innocuous by the standards of a Rashaqin whose forelimbs were two meters long and murderously barbed). It simply paused, and then quite sensibly asked, What sort of a treasure?

  “I don’t know,” I answered. “It’s the Eschaton Artifact. Whatever that is!”

  A string of nouns.

  “Unsettling nouns.” Connla, atypically quiet, cocked his head and looked at me.

  Briefly, I described what I had noticed about the anomalies in the dark gravity, starting from quite early on in my development of superpowers: a pattern. A change—an intentional alteration—to the structure of the universe itself that, as far as I could tell (which admittedly was not very far) had no effect at all on how it functioned. But rather, just served to point attention at one not particularly interesting bit of intergalactic space.

  A bit of intergalactic space that, once I was moved to check it out, turned out to have a significant gravitational anomaly parked in it. An anomaly,
say, something on the order of a very large star. And yet, emitting no light or other radiation that I or Singer could detect at all.

  An anomaly that we had been headed right toward, before the Ativahikas pulled us down.

  I expected Cheeirilaq to take a few moments to contemplate this when I finished my recital, but it seemed to make up its mind very quickly—and in accordance with mine.

  Do you know that means, Friend Haimey?

  “No,” I said. Frustration was making me tense and grumpy.

  Well, whatever lies at those coordinates, Farweather and by extension Habren want it. Cheeirilaq’s mandibles moved ominously.

  I laughed out loud, both at the implicit threat, and at the close parallel between the Goodlaw’s thoughts and my own. Then I said, “I’m pretty much of the opinion that anything those two want, they’re not allowed to have.”

  Again we are of like mind, Friend Haimey.

  It paused again, settling itself in an elegant folded configuration amid the glossy strands of its web. It had assured me that the web was not sticky—that it had spun dry silk, only, because what good was a bed that wound up stuck full of bits of cat fluff and stray humans and random cookware and possibly entire cats, for that matter—but I didn’t feel like taking any chances with it. My ancient alien tattoo was reminder enough not to go sticking your hand into alien booby traps.

  When it spoke again, my senso gave its words the air of grave and certain determination. So we must “get there first,” as I believe the aphorism goes among your species.

  “Have you forgotten our stowaway? The one we haven’t managed to ferret out yet? The one who wanted to go to these coordinates in the first place?”

  Not at all. But with my presence, and the assistance of six other constables as a prize crew, I believe I will be able to justify the position that being trapped on a ship with that many law enforcement officers constitutes a form of custody.

  Singer said, “Unless she escapes and kills us all.”

  Well, yes. Cheeirilaq admitted. One must consider all the possibilities.