Ancestral Night

by Elizabeth Bear

  The music was not so much atonal as layered in weird harmonies and intervals that didn’t quite mesh. Or maybe they worked, and it was just that they were so very different from my experience and expectations. The hull reverberated and chimed and the music grew. It had patterns within it, but not rigid ones. Instead, they were the various and periodic patterns of speech, of solar systems, of biological systems, of galaxies.

  “Music?” Connla asked. “Are we on hold?”

  Bushyasta, in the most exuberant burst of energy I had ever seen her betray, swarmed up my leg and huddled into my arms. She buried her face in the crook of my elbow and shivered piteously.

  “Damn it, Singer,” Connla snapped, “you’re scaring the cats.”

  “It’s not me,” Singer said.

  “Music,” I said.

  Every sentient head in the room swiveled toward me.

  “Music,” I said again, excitedly. “Talk! Sing! I think the star is talking to us.”

  “By setting up a sympathetic vibration in our hull?” Connla asked.

  “It’s all Koregoi tech,” Singer said, following my line of thought. “How am I supposed to know what they thought was a reasonable means of communication?”

  “Well, fix it,” I snapped.

  “If it was easy, I would have done so already.”

  The closest constable clutched the back of a seating frame, looking faintly nauseated. If their species became nauseated, which I suppose is questionable. My own hands were over my ears, but the vibrations crept up my leg bones, so it didn’t help much.

  Friend Singer, Cheeirilaq said, poking a mandibled head through the hatchway with fine disregard for decompression risk, can you perhaps . . . turn it down somehow?

  “I can . . . render the hull less elastic,” Singer said dubiously. “That will lower the amplitude of the vibrations. It might raise the frequency to uncomfortable levels.”

  “Be expedient,” I said. “Just do it.”

  A faint shudder of separation rang the Prize’s hull like a stroked glass bell as the sound hammering all of us faded somewhat. I stared up at the dome in time to catch a glimpse of two silvery motes surrounded by minuscule white coils sweeping away from us, headed outsystem. A moment later there was a coruscating blur as they folded space-time and were gone.

  “What the Well was that?” Connla asked. “What’s that that just left the ship?”

  “It’s a tiny little drone. Two tiny little drones,” said the closest constable.

  “A couple of probes going back the way we came, I warrant,” I said tiredly.

  “Shit,” said Connla eloquently. “That fucking pirate. Letting her friends know we’ve arrived.”

  Cheeirilaq waved antennae. The good news is that we now have a better idea of Farweather’s whereabouts. Constable Grrrs, with me.

  It vanished out the hatch, and Grrrs was right behind it. I wanted to be in hot pursuit as well. I longed to be with them, going after Farweather. I wanted to shout “Watch for traps!” as they scrambled out the door. But of course, of all the beings on the ship, Grrrs probably needed the warning less than any except for Murtaugh, and Murtaugh wasn’t going to be running after anything for a while, no matter how much they might want to. So I just wished Grrrs luck, from little blue hooves to quivering antennae, and forced myself to let it go.

  “That singing.”

  “Yes,” Singer said. “I am confident that you are correct and that it’s an attempt at communication. The problem is, what is it saying? And if it is, say, a passphrase—how do we give them the countersign?”

  “And is it a welcome,” Connla said, “or a warning?”

  “I’m going to go with warning.” I was still standing closest to the windows, so I was the first to notice that there was more light emerging from that dim red star suddenly. I pointed. Singer drew Connla’s attention as well, and my shipmate crossed to stand at my elbow. I couldn’t get used to all this moving in two dimensions and how awkward it was.

  Bushyasta was still cuddled into the crook of my arm, but at least she’d stopped shaking when the noise abated somewhat. She’d probably replace it with tiny, mellifluous kitten snores presently.

  Singer hit the magnification. Connla and I stood shoulder to shoulder and watched the night unravel.

  Hundreds of thousands of kilometers away, the enormous constellation of objects we’d come all this way to investigate began to peel itself apart. Not all at once. But starting at the point closest to the Prize, and moving around the sphere in a stately ripple, the glassy charcoal-colored plates of the top orbital shell peeled off like a fruit skin and zoomed toward us. I stepped back involuntarily as the dull, grimly red sun extended a searching finger comprised of myriad comparatively infinitesimal scales out toward us.

  “Yup,” Connla said. “That looks aggressive to me.”

  “Maybe they’re just coming to say hi?”

  “Figure the odds,” Singer said.

  I refrained from pointing out that figuring the odds was his job. Instead, I said, “Do you think they’re asking for a countersign?”

  “The code?” Singer asked. “That could be what it’s meant to give us, right? If it’s not just a string of words.”

  Connla said, “Assuming this is all sort of some plan. And not a random sequence of coincidences we’re fitting to a pattern.”

  “If we were led here,” I retorted, “I’m going to assume it was for a purpose. Singer, about that code—”

  “I’m not entirely sure it is a code,” he said. “Or if it is, that we have the right key. I ran the scan through every permutation I could think of; brute force operations where cleverness failed. Counting forward, counting backward. Offsets and reversals. It doesn’t give me anything but strings of nonsense. And moreover, the whole mess is problematic because frankly, some of the integers that would seem to indicate which word on the page to use are higher than the number of words on any page! I tried various ways of compensating for this, such as counting through again—several times, if needed. I tried counting onto the next page. I tried counting to the end of the page and counting back, fan-fold style, I tried—” He made a sound like an exasperated sigh. “That list of words was the best I could manage. At least they seem thematically linked.”

  “And here we are around a star, and there is music,” I reminded.

  “There must be more to it, for the pirates to put so much effort into retrieving the data, however.”

  “Did you try counting letters?” Connla interrupted.

  “Letters. No, I did not consider that as a parameter. One moment please.”

  While he ran that, I looked at Connla. “We’re taking a pretty wild guess here. Even assuming that the book Niyara gave me has any bearing on the string of numbers Farweather had memorized—even assuming they go to the same code! Connla. How did the Freeporters wind up with functional Koregoi gravity?”

  “That one’s easy,” he said. “You told me about the marker buoy, for one thing. And for another, we’re not the only people who can salvage a wreck, and they obviously spend time in places that aren’t as picked clean as our usual haunts.”

  “Okay. Fair. How did the Freeporters know to go steal the Koregoi senso that the Jothari were refining from the Ativahikas? And how long have they been working on this plan, if Niyara was in on it back when I was . . . nineteen?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. He turned back to the window. “I can guess that they knew about the senso from . . . from that history you discovered, about how the Jothari were navigating to begin with. I don’t know if we’ll ever know the rest of it. But I do know one thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Somebody in Freeport space knows the answer, and they have a hell of a story to tell.”

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  “It’s a tune,” Singer said, in a tone of voice that made me think he’d be hitting himself upside the forehead if he had hands.

  “A . . . song.”

  “Yes. Whoever cra
fted the code was extremely clever. Not only does the code seem to correspond to words, but if you interpret it backward, it also corresponds to a series of letters and spaces. These letters and spaces seem very likely to indicate musical notes, in one form of Terran notation. I am assuming that when the same letter is repeated without spaces in between, that is an indication of the duration of the note. So four Es would be an E whole note, and two would be an E half note, and so on.”

  “Brilliant!” I said. “So you can sing it?”

  “There are complications.”

  “. . . Of course there are.”

  “I have no idea what sort of time signature we’re dealing with here. Or if the pitch of the notes matters, as the same letter can be used to signify a number of different absolute frequencies that bear a particular relationship to one another, which is to say that the interval is defined as the ratio between two sonic fre—”

  “Singer,” I said. “Please assume that Connla and I both have the same ability to parse musical theory as this cat here.” I demonstrated Bushyasta, who wasn’t quite snoring yet but was purring in her sleep.

  “Cut to the chase?” Singer asked.

  “Cut to the chase,” I confirmed.

  “I’m going to have to experiment.”

  “Right.” I gestured to the windows. “Experiment fast. Because those look like countermeasures.”

  “I shall endeavor to. What are you going to do in the meantime?”

  “Help the constables hunt Farweather.” I glanced at Connla. “And I guess we can start preparing for the worst by battening down the cats.”

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Right. This is where busywork came in handy. When you’re facing down something bigger than you are, that you can’t do anything about, and you’re waiting for your shipmate to finish a series of possibly life-or-death experiments in carrying a tune, you need to keep . . . well, busy. And thinking about it isn’t helpful, because there aren’t any immediate solutions, and thrashing just to be doing something would make it worse. And dwelling on it isn’t going to accomplish anything except for making you miserable.

  So you try to keep yourself out of trouble until the time for action comes, because what else are you going to do?

  It’s a theory, anyway. I wonder how often it worked, back in the olden days, before rightminding?

  Right now, I wanted to do something—anything—to deal with the alien armada coiling inexorably toward us from the dim, almost infrared old sun. I wanted even more to do something—anything—to help bring Farweather into custody. I was taking that one personally, because I’d had her and I’d let her get away.

  We were getting real-time updates from Cheeirilaq and its able-bodied constables, and the busywork I found for myself (once the cats were secured) was trying to help them locate Farweather through the Koregoi senso. It still wasn’t working, even though we had a better fix on her location now that she’d launched those drones.

  They hadn’t been Koregoi drones. They’d folded themselves into white space quickly, but not so quickly Singer hadn’t gotten footage of them, and they looked perfectly representative of Freeport tech. They hadn’t been among her gear when I searched it, so she must have hidden them somewhere on this vast, ridiculous ship. Someplace I hadn’t thought to look.

  Well, she hadn’t thought to look in the places where I’d hidden the bits of her gun, either. They’d all been there when I’d gone and retrieved them. It was still DNA-coded to me too.

  I hated the thing, but it seemed wise to hang on to it, so I reassembled it, pulled out the power supply, and hid it under a jacket I borrowed off a human constable about twice my size.

  Murtaugh, actually, since they weren’t going to be needing the coat for patrols.

  They were bored, but there was no sign of infection setting in. They probably could have used some busywork to keep their mind off their injuries, too.

  Void and Well, where was she hiding?

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  A little while later, I said, “Singer, I have a terrible idea.”

  “Well,” he answered, after a Singer-model Significant Pause. “I’m out of good ones.”

  “So Farweather has a hiding place somewhere that we can’t locate. Several hiding places, possibly. She must have concealed the drones in some of them—”

  “Thank you for the recap,” Singer said blandly. “I’ve grown so forgetful in this massive alien ship with all its room to stretch out in.”

  “You know hominids like to listen to ourselves talk,” Connla said.

  Murtaugh, from their pallet by the windows, snorted. By this point, I had them figured for the strong silent type.

  “The actual point I was actually making,” I said, “is that we can’t know what other equipment she has access to. More projectile weapons, maybe. Another suit. She could have caches all over the ship.”

  “Okay,” Connla said. “Valid.”

  “And?”

  “And I’m sorry I doubted you.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “So how terrible is your terrible idea?” Singer asked.

  “Well.” I gestured to the swarm of dark motes, glittering dully in the inflamed glow of the dying star, that were inexorably closing in. “I’ll tell you.”

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  “Zanya Farweather,” Singer intoned. His voice reverberated strangely through the empty corridors and chambers of the Prize. I’d never heard him broadcast through the whole hull before, and it overlaid and interacted strangely with the still-wordless, still-echoing alien melodies.

  “Zanya Farweather,” Singer repeated. “If you are within the sound of my voice, this is shipmind speaking on behalf of the Synarche prize crew currently in possession of this vessel.”

  I looked around while he repeated the message. Ops—I still couldn’t bring myself to call it a command cabin on a vessel this size, or a bridge when it didn’t have any stuff in it for, you know, driving a ship or anything—Ops had enough people in it to actually seem crowded.

  I glanced over at Murtaugh, who was freshly installed in their suit and grumbling something uncomplimentary as they heaved themself up.

  “Wait, you can talk?” I teased.

  They rolled their eyes at me. “Don’t chatter; won’t whine,” they said easily. “Better for everybody.” They leaned on a crutch and grinned.

  As part of our plan, the constables had all come back up and were variously cluttering up the place. I missed my quiet and privacy. Funny how there’s a fine line between too much alone, and not enough. At least Cheeirilaq had retreated to its web in the corner, and the cats weren’t underfoot, having been captured (more of a trick with Mephistopheles than Bushyasta) and tucked up in their kitty carrier–cum–life pod.

  We were all suited now, just in case, though not helmeted up. The alien swarm was getting too close for comfort.

  I’ve never been as jealous of exoskeletons as I was when I saw Cheeirilaq’s space suit. It was just a film, adhering to the Goodlaw’s carapace and covering the oxygen-supplement tubes Cheeirilaq wore habitually in human-friendly environments anyway, though I assumed they were feeding it a richer mix now. It wore a combination oxygen tank and battery pack on its back between its wing coverts, and the shimmering gold threads of circuitry covering its intensely green body were thermal control. Since it didn’t breathe through its head, and since its lidless eyes were covered in a hard, transparent casing, it didn’t have a bulky helmet limiting its perception.

  Damn, that was a convenient design, given planetary conditions that could support it.

  Also, the filmsuit gave it an iridescent shimmer that was quite pretty, especially combined with the gold and the green.

  “Message follows,” Singer said finally, and we all heaved a sigh of relief—those of us built to sigh, anyway. I turned and stared out the window. They were still coming. Visible progress: I could watch the flock of alien fighters or drones or limpet mines or whatever they were grow visibly, minute t
o minute, now.

  Lots of time in space to appreciate what dire straits you’re in, unless you never even see what gets you.

  “A change is as good as a rest,” Connla said, parting the sea of dark teal and slate gray Justice uniform suits.

  I guess I probably should have found those suits . . . troubling, intimidating . . . anxiety-producing? . . . given the history I’d discovered with Justice. But I didn’t. Not now. Having consented to what they’d done made a difference.

  Connla stood on my left. I kicked him in the ankle with the side of my afthand to let him know that I was grateful.

  Singer waited a five count, then said, “Captain Farweather, we are requesting a truce.”

  “Captain?” Connla leaned back.

  “Whatever it takes.”

  “We are requesting this truce for the purpose of discussing an alliance between you and our crew. We believe that our only effective means of dealing with an existential danger that threatens us all. We have half of the solution needed to communicate with and defuse the Koregoi countermeasures. We believe you are in possession of the other half.

  “Again, we wish to offer you a truce and cooperation toward assuring our mutual survival.”

  Connla bent his head toward my ear. “Do you think she’ll go for it?”

  I shrugged. “She’s a narcissist. We’re appealing to her vanity.”

  “Zanya Farweather,” Singer began again.

  “Fuck me with a white coil,” Connla breathed.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Somewhere between seven and six thousand and twelve repetitions of the litany later, just as I was about to declare my terrible plan a failure and beg Singer to stop . . . the hatch cover on the main entry to Ops evaporated. I spun around, along with every constable in the place except Murtaugh, who was already facing that way and leaning on a crutch besides. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Cheeirilaq freeze in what could only be a hunting posture.

  The constables had their bolt prods out. Adrenaline thrilled up my nerves.