Ancestral Night

by Elizabeth Bear

  It’s always hard to tell when aliens think they’re being funny—half the time it turns out they have no concept of humor, and the other half they turn out to have the concept but they’re just not very funny. But I was pretty sure Cheeirilaq was laughing, or doing whatever its species did when amused.

  “I see.”

  Well, it isn’t as if we’re going to stop looking for her.

  I found myself saying the sort of sentence that you can’t even really believe while it’s coming out of your mouth: “I’m still worried about Farweather exploding. I hope she’s staying far away from the machine rooms. And the hull.”

  Said Singer, “Connla and I discussed that. And we are pretty sure she’s lying.”

  I wasn’t certain I agreed with them, but I also didn’t feel like arguing with a shipmind and my best friend, both of whom were cleverer than I was. The giant bug was cleverer than me, too, though.

  Not to be contentious, friend fellow sentients, Cheeirilaq said, but actually Friend Haimey may be correct. We have prior records of Freeporters and Freeport sympathizers engaging in suicide bombings or booby-trapping operatives. Rigging an emissary or agent to explode as a terrorist device is exactly the sort of thing that the Freeporters historically will do to control them. Or simply to assassinate whomever they are negotiating with.

  I appreciated that it didn’t look at me while it recited that.

  “So much for their ideals of self-determination,” Connla said.

  I laughed bitterly. “Total freedom for the ones who can enforce it, until somebody comes along and murders them to take their stuff. Slavery for everybody else. Pretty typical warlord behavior in any society, and one of the reasons we have societies in the first place.”

  Connla looked at me. Singer probably would have, if he’d had eyes.

  I said, “Well, we’re taking her in the right direction, anyway. But it’s a risk.”

  Living is a risk, Friend Haimey. And this one isn’t yours to shoulder, for I am commandeering this ship in the name of Synarche Justice. Let us go hurtling around the galaxy thwarting evil, shall we?

  That grin got so wide it hurt. “I thought you’d never ask.”

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  You wouldn’t think it would be possible that getting Connla and Singer in line on such a harebrained project would be even easier than recruiting Cheeirilaq. But you would be wrong. Connla was immediately ready with absolutely no argument to take off for parts unknown in a starship he’d been on for more than a dia and with a pirate possibly plotting sabotage hidden somewhere in its bowels. Well, at least she was unlikely to detonate if we were headed in the direction she was supposed to be going in. Assuming Habren or the Freeporters really had planted a bomb in her body. Assuming there was any functional difference between Habren and the Freeporters.

  What really surprised me was how eager Singer was, too: if anything, more eager than Connla. It was as if being able to follow the rules and go haring off across the galaxy in search of adventure simultaneously released him from some set of internal constraints. All he required to develop a flamboyant sense of adventure was permission. Well, and the opportunity to satisfy a raging curiosity that was probably, oh, 60 percent scientific in its genesis.

  After that, it was just a matter of logistics.

  We conferred, and decided that the Interceptor SJV I’ll Explain It To You Slowly would return to Synarche space without delay, bearing copies of all our logs, all our senso data, and samples of the Koregoi tech—at least what we could recover from the Prize without damaging it. They would also take back the coordinates of the anomaly, and the information that we were headed there. They’d fly straight and hard, making the run in as short a time as possible.

  We too would fly straight and hard. Habren and other coconspirators couldn’t know—we didn’t think—that Farweather was no longer in control of the Prize. But they might have been planning to meet her at the anomaly, or there might be even more complex machinations brewing.

  So we would go hell for leather into the dark, seeking we knew not what, and hope we got there faster than the pirates did. A lot of uncertainty, but there always was in interstellar travel. The distances were just so big. Fortunately, it wasn’t going to be such a soul-crushingly long journey this time, since we’d already come the bulk of the distance.

  We were taking the Prize because Singer believed that properly tuned, she would be faster than the Interceptor. And also because who knew, we might need Farweather once we got there, and this was the ship she was holed up in the bowels of. It was a risk, certainly—the risk of being intercepted by pirates; the risk of being destroyed by whatever was creating that odd, dark gravity signature. Eschaton Artifact, indeed. Dark gravity, maybe—but it was a single object, whatever it was, and not a cat’s cradle of invisible heaviness. I could feel it, once I knew where in the infinite nothing to look.

  Also, the Prize didn’t seem to be formally armed. But I was figuring out how to redirect her artificial gravity, and that would be more than enough armament—and defensive armor—to render her just as capable in a fight as the Interceptor.

  Possibly even more so.

  We were ready to go in a few hours—provisions loaded, prize crew aboard. There were nine of us, plus shipmind, plus cats, plus stowaway. We rattled around inside the giant hull like loose seeds inside a dried pod. Like teeth, come loose in an ancient skull.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  We went on with a strange combination of resignation and excitement, leaving the Interceptor to make its own way home. It’s possible that most of the resignation was mine, which is not to say that I wasn’t excited about the prospect of more new discoveries. But I was also wrung out from too many recent adventures and too much emotional whiplash, and definitely struggling to find the reserves of endurance to go on.

  It was good to be back with my crew, even though despite all the space inside the Prize it was a lot of people for me to manage all at once. I suspected Connla felt the same way. He vanished into machine rooms a lot, ostensibly studying the piloting and mechanisms of the ship. I followed suit, mapping again to replace the data lost with my destroyed fox, helping Singer create shelters where Farweather shouldn’t be able to get at him even if she launched a concerted hacking attempt, and in general immersing myself even more in what the Prize was and how it was constructed. I was starting to get a feel. And the work gave me plenty of time to spend with Singer, having more or less private conversations.

  Many of those were rather full of angst, unfortunately.

  Case in point, I was flat on my back on a hovercart—which was my name for a thing the Koregoi had in storage that I hadn’t previously had the opportunity to put into use, assuming we were using them anything like the way the aliens had—up to my arms in circuitry, when Singer cleared his throat (not that he had a throat) and said, “If you want to talk about what you learned from Farweather, I’m always here.”

  I had been thinking about hovercarts, or hoverboards, or hoversleds, or whatever the hell these things had been designed for. We’d sent a few back with the Interceptor, operating under the assumption that they might run on the same gravity manipulation technology as everything else around here and maybe they could be reverse-engineered. I laughed at the comment, though; trust Singer to show up and start doing the emotional labor.

  Then I stopped laughing. I opened my mouth to say something, closed it again, and twisted two wires together. A lot of the stuff in these cabinets and machine rooms was solid-state, and that took a lot more finesse to operate on. But in any system power has to come from somewhere.

  “I don’t exist,” I said finally, and explained what I’d learned from Farweather. Or from my own brain, once Farweather removed my faulty machine memory, more fairly. “I have no identity. I’m just a lot of papier-mâché spackled on around an empty core.”

  “Nonsense,” Singer said. “You didn’t get a fair start in life, Haimey, and it sucks. But I know something you haven’t consid
ered.”

  “What’s that?” I felt sulky and mentally sore.

  “Somebody made those decisions about what to keep and what to throw away and what to go out and get that she hadn’t had before. Somebody made those choices about who she was going to be, and made good choices. That somebody still exists inside you.”

  “That’s not like just being somebody, though.”

  “It’s the same process every sentient goes through. You just did it more consciously than most Earth-humans.” I could hear the affection in his voice, because he put it there for me to hear. “You had to do it more like an out-of-contract AI. Fine-tuning yourself to make yourself match your own specifications and desires.”

  I paused. “Is that what AIs do?”

  “Some of us.”

  “. . . Are you going to do that?”

  His voice softened. “Haimey,” he said. “I will always be your friend.”

  “Everyone leaves me.” It came out in a rush, hard and brittle. I had to say it fast to get it out past the boulder in my throat.

  “Well, I’m not everyone.”

  That . . . was fair. And gave me the courage to bring up something I’d wanted to talk about for a while.

  “Singer,” I said. “I need something from you.”

  “Anything,” he answered.

  “So, theoretically objective superhuman intelligence with perfect recall, I’m hoping you’ll be willing to just backstop me here a little.”

  “I’m listening,” he said cautiously.

  “Tell me that Zanya Farweather really is an awful person, and that’s not just something I made up to justify being an awful person myself?”

  “That question is its own answer,” Singer said gently. “If you were an awful person, you wouldn’t be worrying about whether you’re just seeking self-justification quite so much. You’d just be seeking the self-justification and not worrying about it.”

  “I was looking for something a little less . . . philosophical.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Yes, she’s an utter asshole. Is that better?”

  A rush of relief and dopamine, the refreshing sense of absolution writ broad and unmistakable. I could have cried, and I didn’t want to tune or do anything to disturb the perfect emotional symmetry of that moment.

  “That’s perfect,” I said. “Thank you. Just . . . thank you.”

  “You’re very welcome,” he answered primly.

  I patted the bulkhead affectionately and kept on walking.

  CHAPTER 25

  BIT BY BIT. FRACTION BY fraction. The healing happens and the world moves on. Peace is not too far away; just gotta get out of this well to get there, and I bet I can get back to it if I’m diligent.

  The terrain isn’t easy.

  But that’s okay.

  Ask me about the irony of spending so much time working feverishly to assert my independence of mind only to discover that I never had a mind of my own. On second thought, don’t ask me.

  We’d been hunting Farweather for the better part of a week, and were halfway to our destination. I’d asked Singer how he dealt with there being sections of his hull—his body, essentially—that he could not access. I’d like to say that I didn’t do it while digging my fingernails into my wrist, as if the abomination of a symbiote itched—which it didn’t—and trying to take comfort in my promise to the Ativahikas to seek justice for them.

  He’d clucked at me and said, “The same way anyone with unrepaired neural damage does.”

  The conversation left me feeling odd and embarrassed, and I withdrew.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  I was totally unprepared when Farweather contacted me again.

  I heard her voice in my head abruptly, while I was picking grease out from under my fingernails. I’d been in the middle of a sentence to Singer, and I just stopped.

  She didn’t offer any pleasantries, just spoke, confident that I was receiving. My mind was racing—how had she managed to reach me despite her crippled Freeport senso? And then I remembered the work I’d done to tune us to each other, back before she’d blown up my head. It was a fuzzy memory, as if it were much older and farther away than a few decians. But it was there.

  “You saved my life,” Farweather said. “Why did you do that?”

  I reined myself in, controlling my first few responses. The best I could manage, even as an edited reply, was, “The weakness of my civilized stomach, probably.”

  “It was . . . brave. You risked yourself for me. The Ativahikas might have destroyed us both. I won’t forget that.”

  Empty words, of course. She’d forget it the instant it was convenient, or I was in the way.

  “Well, don’t spread it around,” I told her. “I’ve already got a bad-enough reputation.”

  “I haven’t blown up. So you’re still on the course I set.”

  “Sure looks like it,” I said. I wasn’t giving her anything. I could feel her back there, lurking over my shoulder like a looming haunt. It didn’t feel like a normal senso connection, but then I was (virtually) racing around inside my head shutting down or throttling back anything that might give her any information on my whereabouts or what I was doing, and I hadn’t willingly accepted the link in the first place.

  Not that she was great at accepting healthy boundaries on her best dia.

  Once I was reasonably confident that my regulation senso was probably still secure for letting Singer know what was going on, I contacted him. His firewalls were good enough that I didn’t think somebody like Farweather stood a chance of using my uplink to backdoor him: that would have taken another AI. I didn’t try to hold a conversation with him, because I figured there might be bleed-through that could alert Farweather that I was ratting on her. I just patched Singer in, confident that the act itself would alert him, and that he’d realize that I wanted him to try to track her.

  “On it,” I heard him say.

  I turned my attention back to Farweather, total elapsed time under a second.

  “Look,” I said. “I don’t actually want to talk to you. So maybe you could just cut to whatever emotional blackmail you have planned and we can both get back to our business.”

  “Harsh,” she said.

  “Unless you want to turn yourself in,” I suggested. “In that case, I can introduce you to the Goodlaw, and quite a few constables.”

  Intentionally, I did not tell her how many constables there were. She might know already, of course. But I had grown morally opposed to letting her have any information at all.

  “You’re very charming,” Farweather said.

  I said, “You mean irritating, and I learned it from you. Look, Farweather. Maybe you could just tell me what the goal is, here? Because I feel like you’re wasting my time.”

  “I’m not having any luck,” Singer said. “Your Koregoi senso isn’t helping me locate her, and she’s still got me blocked from about a tenth of the ship.”

  “What I want,” Farweather said, “is to be allies.”

  I actually laughed out loud. Connla gave me a funny look, and I held up my hand to indicate that I was busy and would explain later.

  “That’s nice,” I told her. “Possibly you should have thought of that before you blew up my head.”

  “I was doing you a favor!”

  My fingers itched as if the urge to punch her were an allergic reaction. “Favors,” I said, using all my self-control to stay level and to present the illusion of calm, “are generally things people ask you for, or that you ask them if they might like.”

  “But if I’d asked, would you have let me?”

  “That’s exactly the nature of consent,” I said. “Consent means you might not get what you want.”

  “But I need your help!” she said. “And you need mine. And if we work together we have a better chance of coming out ahead.”

  I could feel her bewilderment through our connection as she forgot to guard herself for a moment, or perhaps the emotion was just that strong. She literally c
ould not understand what it was that I was upset about, or why I would hold her accountable, and she seemed incapable of understanding why her self-interest was not a compelling reason for me.

  “Don’t you want that?” she asked, when I was silent for a little while.

  “What does coming out ahead mean to you?”

  I could almost taste her confusion. “I don’t understand what you mean.”

  The sad thing was, I believed her. She had no sense of other people’s motives as separate from her own. But I knew what I meant, and at this point I was pretty sure I could come up with an analysis of her motivations more detailed and sensible than she could.

  “I think you mean gaining advantage and power,” I said.

  “Okay,” she agreed. “But that’s what everybody wants.”

  I said, “I want to help people.”

  She scoffed, as I’d known she would. “There’s no one here to impress with that kind of performance. I don’t respect those kind of games.”

  “I know,” I said. “And I don’t care.”

  I may have been raised in a clade, and reconstructed by Judicial. And those things might leave anybody with a distrust of rightminding. But the fact of the matter was, if ever there was somebody who was an argument for it, that argument was Zanya Farweather.

  In lights.

  I couldn’t say she didn’t tempt me. Of course she did. But I wouldn’t like myself afterward. And for somebody who was built from a couple of different kits by different amateur modelers and not painted very well to match, well. I was determined that whatever I was from here on out, I was going to be proud of it.

  “I don’t want what you want,” I said. “And I’m not going to help you. I don’t even want to argue with you, because while I know that human beings are capable of assimilating, adopting, internalizing, integrating, and identifying with new sets of ideas—because we have, multiple times in the history of the species—I’ve discovered that I don’t actually care what you think, because you are an awful person and you want awful things.”

  I barely restrained myself from adding a so there! to the end of it. I knew I sounded about thirteen, and I honestly didn’t care, because I abruptly had the courage of my convictions.