Ancestral Night

by Elizabeth Bear

  It was a morally complex equation. But I knew in my bones that some kind of reconciliation was the right choice to pursue. Horrible crimes were committed by them, and by us—against each other and against unrelated others.

  I hadn’t quite been emotionally prepared for them to just utterly spurn my offer.

  Although.

  I hadn’t accepted it when Farweather—representing Niyara’s people, after all—had wanted me back in her fold. But that was because she was untrustworthy, and just wanted to use me. Use me more.

  The Synarche wouldn’t use the Jothari again, would they? We had learned some things in the intervening centuries. Some things about being a pluralistic society without bringing colonial force to bear.

  Hadn’t we?

  . . . If we had, I had to let the Jothari walk away. And determine their own direction.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  I didn’t have to let them have possession of the Baomind, though. And I didn’t have to let them hand it over to—or even share it with—the Freeporters. Who were assholes.

  Especially since the Baomind had asked us—or Singer, at least—for help.

  The problem was, my resources currently included one representative of Justice, one half-dead pirate who wasn’t on my side anyway, and one engineer who was in a race between suffocation and bleeding to death. I was steadfastly refusing to look at my ox meter. Let it be a surprise.

  Come on. Come on. Think of something. Come on.

  I leaned my helmet against Cheeirilaq’s film-suited carapace. “I might be out of ideas, Friend Cheeirilaq.”

  I am sorry, Friend Haimey. I also . . . may be out of ideas.

  Exhaustion clawed me as I watched the enemy ships arrange themselves to clear their firing lines. I bumped my adrenals once more, wishing I believed I’d be around to pay the miserable price for it. The pirates didn’t need me for Niyara’s code anymore.

  The friendly mirror disks of the Baomind swarmed around us, filling me with their encouraging song, a fragile, glittering shield. I felt a terrible sadness for them. How many of their neurons had been destroyed? Worse, did they have individual identities? How much damage had we and the pirates and Jothari already done to them? Not much, I hoped. Surely what had been destroyed was a negligible fraction of the incomprehensibly large number of disks still maintaining their sphere around the dying star.

  Once we were gone, would the Freeporters resort to threats or force to control the Baomind? Would that even work? Or would they just refuse to rescue it, unless it agreed to be enslaved? They despised artificial intelligences, but surely they were capable of seeing that this was a resource too valuable to just destroy, even if they were incapable of seeing it as a person. Of regarding it as an intelligence worthy of protection and partnership.

  I was wondering why they were bothering with the display of force when all they had to do was leave us here. I was wondering if, if they fired, I could wrap us all in a protective fold of space-time. I was wondering if it wouldn’t be better to just die under their barrage rather than putting it off the few minutes we had left. I was wondering, frankly, what kind of a pointless gesture I could make just so I wouldn’t feel like I was just dying passively. I had the handgun: no use at all against anything more armored than a human being in a space suit.

  Thinking that made me realize Connla would be amused by how his culture’s memes had infected me, if he ever got the chance to know—

  One of the pirate vessels began to ease toward us.

  I reached across Cheeirilaq’s thorax and nudged Farweather. When she didn’t move, I balled up my cold, numb fingers and punched her in the arm. It probably hurt me at least as much as it did her. “Commander!”

  Blood spattered the inside of her visor. She must have been coughing it up.

  I sympathized.

  “Can’t you let me die in peace?” Her eyes focused on me with an obvious effort. “Oh, it’s you. No, of course you can’t.”

  “Zanya, what’s that ship?”

  I pointed with my helmet in the time-honored fashion of spacers everywhere.

  It wasn’t hers—the white one that had shot our boom off way back at the beginning of things. This one was a glossy black, a color with depth and reflections, fading to a burnished dried-blood highlight on its raised features. It reminded me of the prized urushi lacquer from the homeworld, an ancient art that still piqued interest throughout the worlds.

  Connla and I had salvaged a ship whose cargo contained three urushi pieces once—two antique pens and a longsword. That trip had taken out a sizable portion of our obligation.

  Farweather’s labored breaths were clear over the com as she struggled to follow. “Oh buttercakes,” she said, which would have made me laugh my arse off if I weren’t in insupportable pain just breathing.

  “That’s the Defiance,” she said. “That’s the Admiral.”

  “There’s no such thing as the Admiral,” I said. “She’s a scary story.”

  She laughed, one choked gasp. It sounded like it hurt. “Well, I guess you’d know.”

  It looked like a pirate admiral’s ship, if anything did. And it was . . . coming to pick us up. Shouldering gently through the swarms of mirror disks, edging toward us. I wondered why they didn’t just send a launch. I wondered why they were coming to get us at all. What loyalty did they have to Farweather, who they’d been willing to remote-detonate if it came down to it?

  “I don’t understand your people,” I told her. My own voice was getting a bit halting now. My head throbbed with that wall of pressure, like something coming in, but whatever it was couldn’t be bothered to make its presence known.

  Maybe it was an artifact of my being in the process of bleeding to death.

  I was still looking at her, so I saw her smile curve behind the blood. “We haven’t got the least idea what makes you people function, either.”

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  The Defiance was nearly on us, and still there was no sign of a launch, and no sign of an opening airlock hatch. It was just coming, easing up on us, matching relative velocities so that, in the vastness of intergalactic space, we seemed to be standing still.

  “Maybe she just wants to look me in the eye while I’m dying,” Farweather said, with many pauses and great effort.

  Oh, she doesn’t like you either?

  I had gotten . . . really fond of Cheeirilaq.

  Farweather bubbled faintly. “I want her job.”

  Wanted, I thought, but didn’t say it.

  The Defiance’s white coils folded away inside its hull when it was in normal space. That was something I’d only heard of on military ships. It allowed them greater close maneuverability, and protected the fragile coils in combat. So it could edge up right next to our tiny little disk with its tiny little Goodlaw and two damaged women on it. And it did.

  I craned my head to look along the looming wall of the hull as it crept past. The lacquer effect wasn’t quite as flawless close up. There were pits and scratches, the marks of use. But I could see now, even in the dim light, that the whole ship was dark red, not black at all. Layers and layers of translucent dark red coating, until it built up to the point where it seemed black, and then the places where it had been smoothed thinner gleamed red.

  Nice ship.

  I wondered where the Admiral had stolen it.

  A ring of red lights outlined what I took to be an airlock, as it drew up before us. The Defiance matched velocities with us so we all seemed to hang perfectly still. In respect to one another, we were—which is as still as anything gets, in this great universe.

  The airlock irised open, and I found myself staring into a space too brightly lit to see clearly.

  If we go in there, Cheeirilaq said, we are never coming out again.

  “But it’s our choice, isn’t it? Die here, or—”

  “I’ll make them . . . drag me,” Farweather gasped.

  Oppositional defiant disorder, definitely.

  “Right,” I said. It w
as a small item of refusal, but it was an item, and it was what I had. I wasn’t going in that ship. I wasn’t going to give myself up to them. Even if it was futile. They’d find a use for me, I was sure. And it was not a use that I would approve of.

  Defiance, indeed. Be careful what you name a thing.

  I kept thinking that even as my gravity headache intensified, and our disk began to float toward the open hatch. The Baomind’s song shrilled, sounding alarmed to my human awareness, and I felt the shiver in our disk even through the intervening body of my insectile friend. Consciousness was at the end of a graying tunnel, and I could see only the brightness of that hatch like the proverbial light at the end of it. It bathed my face, my body, in a golden glow.

  I felt myself falling into it.

  Gravity tractor, Cheeirilaq said, tightening its grip on me. I presume they are making good use of their space-time manipulation technology.

  I fought it, and I could feel the disk fighting it too. But we were clawing up an increasingly steep slope. There were more of them than there were of us. Or they were better practiced. And it seemed like Farweather had faded out again, so no assistance from that direction. And while the Baomind was making curious and agitated music now and might decide to come to our assistance, in three hundred standard minutes or so—I didn’t have time for it to make up its mind.

  I was dimly aware of the mirror disks moving, contracting into a smaller space. Clearing a . . . path?

  Maybe they were planning something. I couldn’t wait to find out.

  I extended my right hand, which still had the small projectile gun webbed to it. I wiggled my gloved finger inside the trigger guard.

  I aimed the gun into the open hatchway and fired, and fired, and fired.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  The gravslide pulling us into the Defiance failed as soon as I shot. Reactive force pushed us backward, augmented by our suddenly useful counterslide. We shot away from the big ship until I managed to get the reaction under control. Not really far.

  But far enough that when something enormous smashed into it from the side—something that I had not seen coming, and sensed only as a gigantic influx of mass—we were not swept along with it. I cringed back against Cheeirilaq, who was still cradling me. Keeping me from floating free. The mantid cringed too, dropping its body between its many legs to lower its profile.

  The Defiance had been spun aside by a tremendous impact. The biggest face I’d ever seen stared down at me again, reflecting pale peach in the rosy glow of the fading star. The corrugations between its starship-sized eyes gave it a surprised and slightly grumpy expression.

  There were hundreds of Ativahikas behind it. Thousands maybe. The sky was as full of them as it was the disks of the Baomind.

  I could not see where the Defiance had been flung. Perhaps it was still flinging. But Jothari and Freeport ships were winking into white space in every direction, and I could only assume they were skittering away as fast as their coils could carry them.

  I wondered if the Ativahika would hunt them down.

  It sounded disappointed when it said, Those who come to realms they cannot live in will always be vulnerable to those who are at home there.

  Perhaps that ripple of its many filamentary appendages was the Ativahika equivalent of a shrug.

  I looked left and right. Why didn’t you stop them before?

  They preyed on the singular. At great distances. It took us time to . . . learn. The voice that wasn’t a voice and the words that were not words were hesitant, as if it were having difficulty expressing concepts that it took for granted as self-evident.

  And is this the justice you promised us, little mind?

  Under the circumstances . . . best I could do.

  Its enormous eye regarded me, close enough to touch.

  The best you could have done, under the circumstances.

  I held my tongue. It didn’t seem like there would be much point to arguing.

  I was ready to be knocked aside as easily as the Defiance. I hoped it would not harm Cheeirilaq.

  My friend is not guilty of anything— I began

  It was, the great voice that wasn’t a voice exactly said. Underneath it, the music of the Baomind agreed. It was the best you could have done.

  Like a giant offering a fingertip to a mouse to sniff, it extended the long, narrow tip of its face toward me. Its snout? Some sensory organ? I didn’t know. It reminded me of the very tip of an elephant’s trunk, but forty times bigger and without breathing holes.

  It stopped a decimeter away.

  Say hello, Friend Haimey, Cheeirilaq murmured in my backchannel. It’s not polite to keep people waiting.

  I somehow managed to hold up my hand. I remembered not to use the one the gun was webbed to.

  I touched an Ativahika. I touched the Ancient One.

  It touched me back. For a moment, I knew its name. But the name of an Ativahika is not something you can remember and recall later, because it’s at once too complex to hold in your mind all at once, and it’s ever-changing—so as soon as you know it, it’s gone.

  But I knew it once. For an instant. And it was like knowing the location of every star in the endless sky.

  What it said to me before it lifted away was, Here is your ship, little mind.

  Then it drifted aside. And what I saw behind it was the Prize, flanked by I’ll Explain It To You Slowly and a dozen other Synarche Interceptors and Cutters; deep-space patrol boats that could hold their own in a fight or a rescue situation.

  They held a loose formation as the Ativahikas disengaged.

  Connla’s voice broke into my com. “Hang on, Haimey. We’re— Just hang on.”

  The Prize began to move in fast. Something caught my attention, rising up from the bottom periphery of my visor.

  A faint red mist.

  Oh. Bleeding ag—

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  That was when I fainted.

  Cheeirilaq got us both inside. I imagine it swarming through the airlock on segmented legs, two bodies draped over the spikes on its raptorial legs, like something directly pulled from atavistic Terran nightmares. I’m glad I slept through that part.

  To catch up on the part I missed: as you’ve probably guessed, I’ll Explain It To You Slowly was coming back to get us. She had encountered an encoded beacon at a waypoint that allowed her to deduce the location of and catch up with a Synarche fleet commanded by SGV I Can Remember It For You Wholesale outbound, in pursuit of the Prize and whatever had hijacked her. I’ll Explain It To You Slowly explained the situation to her sister ships, and the now-combined Synarche operations continued on toward the Baostar coordinates.

  Where they met up with the Prize, running away. Connla and Singer managed to explain the situation to the satisfaction of Memory and her captain . . . who told them to turn right back around and come get us, with all the support a girl bleeding to death in a space suit could desire.

  The whole fleet came to save us.

  That turned out to be handy, because Zanya Farweather and I were about as badly in need of a cryo tube as it’s possible for a human who is not actually already clinically dead to be.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  We think of forgiveness as a thing. An incident. A choice. But forgiveness is a process. A long, exhausting process. A series of choices that we have to make over, and over, and over again.

  Because the anger at having been wronged—the rage, the fury, the desire to lash out and cut back—doesn’t just vanish because you say to someone, “I forgive you.” Rather, forgiveness is an obligation you take on not to act punitively on your anger. To interrogate it when it arises, and accept that you have made the choice to be constructive rather than destructive. Not that you have made the choice never to be angry again.

  Of course, I could have rightminded the anger out. But it’s a mistake to put one’s anger down too soon.

  Anger is an inoculant. It gets your immune system working against bullshit.

  But anger
can also make you sick, if you’re exposed to it for too long. That same caustic anger that can inspire you to action, to defend yourself, to make powerful and risky choices . . . can eat away at you. Consume your self, vulnerabilities, flesh, heart, future if you stay under the drip for too long. The anger itself can become your reason for living, and feeding it can be your only goal. In the end, you’ll feed yourself to it to keep the flame alive, along with everyone around you.

  Anger is selfish, like any flame. And so, like any flame, it must be shielded, contained, husbanded while it is useful and banked or extinguished when it is not.

  But flames don’t want to die, and they are crafty—an ember hidden here, a hot spot unexpectedly lurking over there. Sure, you can turn the feelings off, and I had done that before. But turning off the anger doesn’t lead to dealing with the problems that caused the anger.

  Forgiveness is not easy. Forgiveness is a train with many stops, and it takes forever to get where you are going. And you cover a lot of territory along the way, not necessarily by the most direct route, either. That’s why forgiveness is a process, and as much a blessing for the person who was wronged as for the person who did the wronging.

  And it’s hardest when the person you most need to forgive is yourself.

  I had been very bad at forgiveness, after the terrorists. But I had also been very bad at feeling anger. Feeling angry made me feel guilty. Flawed.

  I hadn’t been raised in a place where I was allowed to be angry. Anger was antisocial. Anger was regulated against.

  Boundaries of any sort were regulated against, come to think of it. By regulating us, the clade members, the children in the crèche. You can’t mind what you’re not allowed to mind.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  I next saw Farweather as the crew of SJV I’ll Explain It To You Slowly were prepping us to slide our failing bodies into cryo tanks on the chance we might survive the long ride home. She turned her head and looked at me. I only noticed it because she spoke, because I’d been ignoring her as hard as I could. Connla was standing beside me in his dapper pilot suit, his ponytail draping in that weird gravity way. He was trying to look unconcerned. It wasn’t working.