Those programmed shackles might be just as well, given the number of horror dramas about rogue personalities out there for one’s . . . enjoyment. And yet. I had a little too much personal experience with what it was like to be a happy worker, in agreement, without too much will to argue for myself or enough agency to set out in my own direction, to feel entirely comfortable with the solution. That was the real reason I came out here to the rim, where life was a constant struggle to validate resource expenditure. I needed my independence of thought, and so I scrapped for my dinner like some twentieth-century barbarian instead of enjoying the comfortable largesse of a Core world where I wouldn’t have to justify my resource footprint.
“Range to objective?” I kept all that out of my voice. That worry about feeling trapped was bugging me a lot todia, but I put the reasons for that as far out of mind as I could. I could have tuned that out, too, but I didn’t want to reach for that crutch too often. Anyway, dissociation is a great coping skill. It can keep you going and functional basically forever. The problems hit when it starts to break down, which is essentially as soon as you start to question your own detachment. Getting in touch with your emotions and experiences is overrated, if you ask me.
And before you tell me that it’s hypocritical of me to be concerned that Connla represses his emotions and then dissociate mine, it’s totally different when I do it. Totally, completely different. I’m doing it on purpose, and not as part of my childhood programming.
“A little less than an AU. I’m decelerating.”
I hung on to my bar and console grips as Connla began slowing us. He wouldn’t brake hard enough that I’d need my acceleration couch. But it was still a mite uncomfortable.
I bloody hate gravity.
We would have left white space at something considerably less than relativistic speeds—though still moving impossibly fast, by human standards. But the thing about space is that it’s still awfully big, even if one can travel very fast, and there isn’t a lot of friction in it to steady the system, so things respond violently to a gentle nudge or a slight shift in momentum.
No unaugmented human mind could perform the calculations necessary to control complicated multi-body problems. Dead reckoning worked better (the back of the mind is much better at figuring out complicated physics problems than the front, which is how the ball hits your hand when you stick it out in front of you), but somebody—something—like Singer was better still.
“Any other boats in the area?” I asked.
Connla said, “No,” at the same moment Singer said, “Not in regular space.”
And the ones in white space would be invisible and immaterial. If there were any. Until such time as they fell on our heads.
We spent a long time in decel. Now that I’d talked myself into tuning, I used this time more wisely: I webbed myself down and took a nap. I’m not sure what Connla did.
I awoke when Singer cheerfully said, “Coming up on our scab in space-time.” He had a light tenor voice, musical and animated, and he liked wordplay and coincidences and was endlessly fascinated by—well, anything. Human social dynamics. Lasers. Tea. Porcelain.
I breathed. There were no gs making me miserable, so I unwebbed and rose up from the couch.
We were alone out here. Nobody was going to come along and snatch our prize todia.
“Whoa,” Connla said. “What in nine gravity wells and an event horizon is that thing?”
Well, that was what I got for feeling cheerful.
It’s hard to get a sense of scale out here. You can hold out your hand and cover the entire bulk of a gas giant with a pinkie nail if it’s at enough distance—and there aren’t many referents to let you know if whatever you’re observing is near or far away.
So when my perceptions told me that something vast was drifting toward us, I was ready at first for it to be the size of my fist. Maybe a tangerine, quick-frozen by space and bobbing alongside the window, maybe hauled along inside our bubble from the inevitable ring of small litter that swarms around any space station.
But it wasn’t a tangerine. Whatever it was, was dark, so it faded into the background of the starscape. It was oily-seeming and iridescent, and it reflected the light of the Milky Way off a dark green surface. The tapered, irregular outline tumbled slowly, a long, majestic arc of curve like three-fourths of the rim of a gigantic, broken wheel. Space station, my mind provided. Catastrophically decompressed.
The part of my brain that recognizes patterns and assigns things to categories was leaning on its shovel catching a few zeds once again. The tumbling arc brought the weird object between us and the long arm of the Milky Way, and I recognized the silhouette, even convulsed into that strange arc, an instant before Singer identified it.
“It’s an Ativahika,” he said. “It appears to be dead.”
“They can die?” I asked, stunned, just as Connla burst out, “What the hell is it doing all the way out here?”
“I hope nothing killed it.” Anything that could take on an Ativahika—well, Singer was an unarmed tug, and fuel-efficient, but not what you would call a fast or maneuverable flyer. He was good at going in straight lines really cheaply while hauling enormous masses at a safe but respectable clip, though—which was why his white coils were so much bigger than he was. None better, if that was what you needed, and usually in our case it was.
I wondered if the Ativahikas would take it amiss if we salvaged one of their own, for purposes of returning the body to them. Or if they might be grateful. Of all the older syster races—assuming they were a syster race—they were in the running for the most inscrutable. I mean, they didn’t talk, at least as far as I knew. But they were generally accepted as sapient. Maybe it was just that they had never needed to communicate anything to something as tiny and fragile as a terrestrial-type species, when they had all of space to call their home.
♦ ♦ ♦
I realized I’d drifted to the window when my nose brushed it. It didn’t get me appreciably closer to the corpse of the Ativahika, and it didn’t cut down on the glare; the viewport covers have a nonreflective coating that makes them, to all intents, invisible. But it’s instinct; people will steer their craft into objects that have attracted their attention.
I caught the rail with my afthands to keep from bumping my nose again. Rubbing my nose gently, I stroked the port with my other hand to enlarge the view.
A living Ativahika looks more like an elongated seahorse than a whale. They’re bilaterally symmetrical, with a frilled head and a tapered neck, trailed by their ridged body and fronded tail. The whole is covered with their seaweed-like appendages, though I have no idea whether that evolved for some mysterious reason in space, or it’s a holdover from wherever they arose. Evolution doesn’t bother to pitch stuff out until it has a reason, and sometimes not even then. The deep, glossy green color is a chlorophyll analogue—a pigment that converts light and carbon dioxide into oxygen and sugar. It’s a symbiote. The Ativahika itself metabolizes oxygen and produces carbon dioxide. Each creature is its own ecosystem in miniature.
Unbelievably, among all the weird and wonderful systers—the methane breathers, the ones that use ammonia as a solvent instead of H2O—they have a biology that is not particularly dissimilar to our own. Unbelievably, because they look like the most alien creature imaginable.
Their bodies are up to ten kilometers in length, and arranged with almost boring normalcy around a central nervous system with a brain and a spinal cord and even a spine. Their bones, rather than being made of calcites, are silicates that they extract by chewing up asteroids, space rocks, and—with particular gusto—the debris that forms planetary rings, which is also where they get their water. They’re in the H2O solvent club along with us. Their blood is even red; the stuff they use to carry oxygen is a close-enough hemoglobin analogue that you could probably make black pudding out of it. If you were some sort of cannibalistic barbarian willing to eat the flesh of sentients, I mean.
Their most spe
ctacular trait, and the one whose absence had slowed my recognition of this particular piece of once-living space debris, is the spread of their fins or wings or filaments. There’s a good deal of argument over what to call the appendages, which spring from the Ativahika’s ridged body like a forest of kelp from a stone. The fins are varying shades of green, depending on their age—from apple-bright to mossy stone. They have variegated edges, and they float and trail around the Ativahika’s body inertially in the weightless, frictionless, air-currentless environment of space. They undulate with the Ativahika’s movement, and serve to increase its surface area for photosynthesis. They also may serve some sensory purpose: nobody knows—nobody human, anyway, none of the humans of my acquaintance have ever seemed to know, and I’ve never had the opportunity to ask a syster.
This particular specimen was unrecognizable in part because it was arched into that back-bending inside-out broken wheel position. And partially because the long taper of its body was, well, not utterly smooth, because I could see wounds and stubs along its length, but shorn. Shorn of tendrils, wings, or fins. And shorn as well of the long, symmetrical appendages they used as manipulators.
I couldn’t imagine that a dead Ativahika would ever be considered a good sign. I wish I could say that, staring at that terrible thing, I had a premonition. But if I had had a premonition of what it really portended, I would have thrown my veto and turned that ship around right that very second and gone to find Judiciary. No matter what it cost us. No matter how long it took.
All the evidence would likely have been gone by the time we got back. And that bothers me a little, and it would have bothered the me in the alternate timestream where I made more cautious choices. Given what I eventually learned, I guess it wouldn’t have been the end of it anyway. There would have been another avenue to get to us. And in any case, time is a river that only flows one way.
It feels . . . odd to be telling this story. It’s just me recording in senso, journaling. I’ve kept ayatana logs, like any crew member does. But it’s never been something I thought anybody else might hear, except maybe a review board, and now . . . now I don’t know who I’m talking to.
But my log might turn out to be important: a historical document or evidence in a hearing or even an inquest and trial. So now I’m thinking about, well, who am I talking to? Because I’m not just talking to myself anymore.
I’m talking to a court panel, maybe. A judge and a couple of AIs and some people from various syster species who’ve come up in the service lottery this an. Or maybe I’m talking to the crew of another salvage tug, because I’m dead and what you have left is this voice record, not even an ayatana. Or maybe I’m talking to a historian, some archinformist who’s unearthed this from a forgotten storage crystal.
Or maybe you’re a pirate.
In which case I hope you choke on what I have to say.
♦ ♦ ♦
“What could cause that?” Connla asked.
You could almost hear Singer shaking the head he didn’t have. “Connla, I do not know. Its trajectory is interesting, however. It seems to be on an elongated orbit around the space-time scar that we came here to investigate.”
“White scars aren’t supposed to have gravity,” Connla said.
“No,” Singer agreed. “They aren’t.”
“How’s the bubble?” I asked.
From somewhere behind me, the scuff of Connla turning. He was no more than a glimpse of shiny black ponytail in the reflective casement at the window’s edge. “Holding.”
“Do you want to investigate?”
Singer did. I admit, I was curious myself. But it seemed like an unnecessary risk, and chasing the corpse down on EM would take time.
And we were here with a job to do.
I pushed back from the window, went to my post, and dipped fingertips into my interface. The unspace around the salvage tug flooded my nervous system with colors, tastes, smells. It tipped and whirled, my sense of balance engaging as well. The white bubble—our own private little artificially generated reality—kept the universal constants in order so our neurons kept firing and our lungs kept lung-ing, and that was a good thing. Once we found the scar and went into it, we wouldn’t be able to see or sense a damned thing beyond it. A border where the laws of physics changed plays hob with the electromagnetic spectrum.
So we crept toward the wormhole scar.
The scar wasn’t exactly visible. It was gravitational, like a slit in the universe with a bit less mass than the areas around it. Galaxies are surrounded—permeated—by a halo of dark gravity. Teflon-coated reality, as it were: stuff we can’t interact with, can’t see, can’t sense . . . except it has mass. Maybe. In any case, it generates gravity. Or curvatures in space-time. Or . . . it amounts to what it amounts to.
So we were swinging our mass detectors around, scanning for a ripple, of sorts, in the heaviness of space. A spot that would appear as if someone had teased a magnet along a pile of iron filings and drawn them all to one side or the other, so they heaped in two ridges and the center became a valley. There was dark gravity here, in the space between the stars, as well as around us, intertwined with the stuff of the Milky Way. The stuff was like spun sugar stretched between sticky fingers, if the galaxy were a snacking toddler.
Although in that analogy the toddler would be mired in an entire gymnasium full of spun sugar, so maybe it’s not the best theoretical model. Especially if you’re the person who has to give that kid a bath.
So there was our gravitational anomaly, which is to say our anomaly in the distribution of mass. A wormhole scar, so-called—the mark left by a particular kind of failed Alcubierre-White transition. If you do one of those right, the dark gravity is supposed to go right back where it started. I mean, given that we still don’t have a really good idea of how gravity works, or where it comes from, and we still haven’t managed to figure out how to generate it despite the fact that it’s been the best part of a millennian since Isaac Newton discovered apples—
Anyway, if your bubble collapses completely, you stop bending space-time around yourself to cheat Newton and Einstein and—if you’re lucky—you pop back out into regular space a few hundred light-ans from anything useful and hope you can repair your drive before you starve or run out of oxy. If you’re unlucky, you come out at an angle to reality where your ship and your biology don’t conform to the local laws of physics, and . . .
. . . oh well.
At least, theoretically. Nobody’s ever come back from an accident like that to comment.
But if your bubble kind of stalls, halfway into the otherworld as it were, neither fish nor fowl, space-time half-bent and half . . . well, normally bendy, because it’s not like there’s such a thing as flat space-time . . .
Then you become my job.
Our job, I mean—mine, and Connla’s, and Singer’s.
It doesn’t happen often—not so often that any given trip through interstellar space is likely to end with the passengers stuck halfway out of space-time. But most ships don’t catch fire, either. Still, enough do that ships have fire suppressant foam, and in a big galaxy with a lot of traffic, there are always a few accidents. Enough to keep a few dozen salvage operators like us in business, anyway.
I waved us forward, and we slid through the hole in the universe as if we were parting the petals on a not-yet-open bud.
Back into white space again.
CHAPTER 2
PROXIMITY KLAXONS SHRILLED UP MY nerves, simulating physical pain. Not incapacitating, but demanding action. Connla had moved toward me. Now he kicked toward the controls, but I knew already what we were hearing. Another vessel’s white bubble had just brushed ours. The interface made the intruding ship a sharp pinch on my skin, an elbow in my ribs.
One brush of its white coils on Singer’s and we were all dead: our chemical processes failing—if not simply our covalent bonds. We were insanely fortunate that it hadn’t unfolded space-time when it was pointed directly at us—or dir
ectly at the thing we’d come to salvage, though that might have been safe for now inside its fold in space.
I’m not sure that anybody had ever run the experiment to find out, and I sure didn’t want to be the one to science that.
Space isn’t empty. The Big Sneeze—some people call it the Enemy, but I’ve always been uncomfortable personalizing—is scattered with particles, some with mass and some without. Some of these particles are in the area before a ship in white space: the space that gets folded, compressed, made smaller. They get swept up in the bubble, and accelerated to match the relative velocity of the ship.
When the ship decelerates, and the fold collapses—unfolds, snaps open—the particles don’t decelerate. Or they do, in that they reenter normal space-time, but at relativistic speeds, and with equivalent energy. They’re released in an energetic outburst.
Very energetic indeed.
An Alcubierre-White drive ship reentering normal space, in other words, is a particle cannon, and there is no way to make it not be. We all just try very hard, all the time, to make sure that cannon is aimed in a safe direction when it’s discharged. Because anything in the ship’s line of deceleration will be blasted into oblivion by massively blueshifted high-energy particles and gamma radiation.
A ship coming out of white space is a weapon that fires automatically, without any regard for the target. So its pilots and its shipmind have to provide that regard.
And if the other guy hasn’t filed a flight plan, or isn’t where he was supposed to be . . . well, he’s too dead to care about the fatalities, which are applied to his pilot’s record and licensure, not yours. If the incoming pilot and shipmind made that mistake? They won’t be flying again. Not to mention having to live with the responsibility of having murdered all souls aboard the target craft.
Out here, where you wouldn’t expect to find another vessel and there isn’t likely to be a world or a star or basically anything that will care about a sudden particle bombardment, we sometimes get a little sloppy.
Ancestral Night Page 2