Also, if he wasn’t afraid to touch me, then I could be not afraid to look.
It was both better than I had feared—and worse. The skin of my left hand looked unchanged—dark, normal, paler on the ventral surfaces, colored ochre in the creases of the palms. The skinned surfaces had already healed without a scar, which reminded me to make sure my ankle got fixed, as well. And freaked me out a little, because I had not had time to make repairs myself yet.
But on the right one, under the transparent top layers of epidermis, over the pigment of the dermis and the buried red of the blood, something moved and shone.
It looked like veils of minute glitter, gold dust maybe, strands and threads of tinsel, fiber optic, fishnet moonlight. It looked like streaks and clots of tiny stars swept up in the veils of iridescent nebulae. I couldn’t tell if it shone, whatever it was, because it was bright in the command cabin. But it definitely caught and reflected what light there was, as if my hand and forearm were gloved in a mesh of holographic wire spangled with faceted crystals, each too small for the eye to individually see. The overall effect was that of reflected white light, but every so often a single beam would catch a colored sparkle, and reflect it straight into my eye.
Get it out of me. I wanted to chew my own forehand off to make it go away. I wasn’t supposed to look like this. My body wasn’t supposed to be this way.
Then Singer said the most perfectly Singer thing he could have. “It looks like a slime mold growth pattern.”
My heart rate dropped. I took a breath and saw the nearly invisible film billow ever so slightly, rippling my field of vision. “A slime mold?”
“Sure,” he said. “The Synarche use them to map trade routes for effective resource delivery. It looks like that. Or like . . . cobwebs.”
If I was going to retreat from panic into Singer Land, I was going for the distraction with all four hands. “How does a cobweb differ from, like, a regular web? Like a neural web or whatever?”
Singer sighed. He sometimes forgets that the rest of us don’t have memory banks the size of a planet. Or the processing cycles to hold twenty conversations at once, navigate a starship, read up on fungi, and probably practice juggling in VR simulation simultaneously, for all I know. And then there’s the politics junkie aspect. These diar I don’t care about the government very much, as long as it gets its job done and stays out of my way. I used to have a girlfriend who was pretty radical, though, and after I realized how toxic some of her ideas were . . . well, it wasn’t a good breakup. I kind of unplugged from the idea that you might want to revolutionize a system that mostly works because it chafes you in one particular spot.
So sometimes our conversations are way over my head. But this time we were talking about something that had infected my body, so I actually could have used it if he were a little more engaged.
“So when we talk about webs,” he said, “we’re actually using a metaphor referring to an organic capture structure used by certain predatory Terran animals—
“Spiders!” Connla interrupted, delighted. A one-track entomologist.
“Among others. Anyway, anything that looked like a web got called a web.”
“Right,” I said, interested in the etymology and entomology lessons, but not so thoroughly I forgot my original question. I mean, I could have just hotsearched it, but what’s the point in living with an AI if you don’t use it as an excuse for laziness once in a while. “So you didn’t answer my question. What’s a cobweb?”
“I know this one,” Connla said. “If a sheltered place was left abandoned or uncleaned for a long time—someplace where weather couldn’t get inside to wash away the old webs—then spiders would just keep spinning more and more of them in place. They would collect dust and old insect parts and become almost like—draperies. Uneven. Stretched from point to point. Tattered. Looked kind of like trade routes, actually.”
I shuddered. Connla grew up on a planet. I was space-raised, and found the idea of anything as unpredictable, violent, and generally murderous as planetary weather frankly nerve-wracking.
“Do you know about the slime molds?”
I tried not to stare at my hands through the isolation film. I wanted to pick at my skin. Except the stuff felt pretty good, whatever it was. My skinned palms—healed completely—tingled. The sensations of waves of heaviness in my right forepalm made it feel as if it were being soothed and stretched. Almost like a massage.
And it was . . . weirdly . . . pretty.
Great. The parasite is affecting the host’s perceptions.
“Tell me about the slime molds, Singer.”
“So if you dot nutrition sources into a media in a particular pattern, then introduce slime mold spores, the mold will grow through the media in—generally—the most efficient manner to exploit those nutrition sources. The pattern winds up looking a lot like what’s on your hand, and it’s an effective model for how to develop efficient packet routes.”
I squinted at my arm, and shuddered again. I could see it, actually; the pale veils and filaments on my dark complexion did look a little like a two-dimensional map of a three-dimensional set of paths, stretched out between and connecting a number of nodes.
“So somebody put a route map in me?”
“It would be irresponsible to come to conclusions based on so little information,” Singer said primly. “However, one of the things it resembles is a route map.”
“All right,” Connla said. “I’m going to take a needle biopsy for Singer to analyze. You’ll feel a little stab, and the film will seal it, right?”
“Right.” He was doing doctorspeak, narrating his actions to help me anticipate and stay calm. I appreciated it, even though I knew this as well as he did and I was so hopped up on my own tuning that all the anxiety and even outright fear seemed light-ans away and on the wrong end of a telescope. Still there; just really hard to locate and get a concrete look at.
He bellied the film at the injury site—which had also healed completely—out a bit, and jabbed me. It was a big needle and it hurt, but when he pulled it out again, it didn’t leave behind a hole, or so much as a drop of blood.
“Wild,” he said.
“Did you get anything?”
He held it up so I could see the wormlike ribbon of aspirated flesh inside the tube. That made me think of intestinal parasites, too. Then he turned around, and put the whole syringe in a drawer that Singer extended to accept it. Singer would extract the sample and break the syringe down into components, ready to print a new one, or something else—a process that incidentally sterilized it, as very few viruses or bacteria could infect or reproduce after being reduced to their component atoms for more compact storage.
There was a whirring sound.
“Parasites on the brain,” I said.
“Well,” Singer said, “not literally. I mean, the good news is, it’s not a parasite. At least, I don’t think it’s a parasite. It seems to be made mostly of silica and some nonreactive metals. A little titanium. Some stuff that . . . well, it has mass. Your hand is heavier than it used to be. Other than that, I’m not sure what to tell you.”
“Am I going to die of heavy metal poisoning?”
“Extremely unlikely,” he replied. “And there’s nothing radioactive in there either. Actually, no apparent power source at all. So whatever it’s doing with the patterning thing, it’s probably deriving the energy for that directly from you.”
“So it is a parasite.”
“Well, it’s not an organic one.” There was a pause—a long pause by Singer standards. “If you want me to speculate, I’d suggest that it’s probably an interface technology of some kind. But what it’s supposed to interface with . . . is either back at the prize, or it’s lost in the mists of the eons.”
I looked at my hand. The webwork moved, sliding gracefully under my skin. As if I had dipped my hand in an aurora. It would probably, I realized, pass for a really nice piece of biolume or a holotoo.
It was still gr
owing, slowly, up my arm. Exploratory strands of sparkles edged toward my elbow, which was space-scaly and needed moisturizing and the ash scrubbed off. Just the sort of stuff that doesn’t seem important to deal with right now when you’re busy, until you can’t get to your skin because you’re sealed inside an isolation film and it’s the only thing you can think about.
Were the sparkle filaments going to cover my entire body soon? That wouldn’t be easy to hide. I’d look like a galaxy.
“Koregoi senso, then.” If it was supertech with no identifiable source, then Koregoi wasn’t a bad bet. Unless the Republic of Pirates had suddenly taken some surprising technological leaps forward, which wasn’t usually the sort of thing pirates excelled at. You generally need at least a modicum of stability for people to have the time and resources to innovate and the will to make risky choices.
“Koregoi senso,” Singer answered. “Sure.”
CHAPTER 5
SO,” I SAID, “I’M PRETTY sure it was sabotage.”
I was anchored by the galley, and Connla had fixed me an actual hot meal, which I was making myself eat slowly and enjoy. The yeast tablets had worn off with a vengeance, and I’d started shaking. I’d been too out of it even to notice that what was happening was a blood sugar crash and not a panic attack. I’d been perching a grab rail and trying to tune and bump my adrenals for five minutes before Connla had shoved the ringnet full of dinner into my hands and saliva had flooded my mouth instantly, even though I couldn’t smell a Well-sunk thing.
At least I was back in free fall. That all by itself was doing wonders for my sense of well-being. My microgravity adaptations are pretty significant—even the afthands aren’t just a graft; there’s tendon and joint modifications to make them work—and I’ve never been a dirtsider. Breathing is more tiring when you weigh seventy kilos than it is when you don’t.
The food was in tubes, because no utensil that went into the isolation film could come back out again. I pulled each tube from the net, plugged it into my film, and evacuated the contents into my mouth. It was all delicious, in a baby-food sort of way. When I was done, the film sealed off the dirty bit at the end, I put it back on the net, and the whole thing went into the recycler.
“The blow on the prize, you mean?” Connla asked.
Connla and Singer had sensoed my feed, downloaded the full experience from my fox, and re’d the ayatana of the spliced-in switches on the Milk Chocolate Marauder, and of what had happened when I toggled those switches. But that didn’t mean they had a window into my head.
I was just thinking out loud. And apparently assuming my thought process was transparent.
The toggle wouldn’t have worked if this monstrosity had a shipmind. And the fact that it was a monstrosity was why they didn’t have a shipmind. The Freeporters don’t have AIs. And I didn’t think any AI incepted under Synarche regulations would participate in something as . . . revolting . . . as harvesting asura.
“I don’t feel too bad about it,” I said. “But I do wonder why.”
“If we could afford the waste, I’d say leave the whole damn ship out here with its victim,” Connla said disgustedly. “Report it and the Synarche can turn it into a memorial.”
It’s nice when your partners share your ethics. And it turns out you don’t even have to clade up with them for that to happen. If you pick the right people in the first place.
“It’s evidence of a crime,” Singer pointed out. “Two crimes, if Haimey’s right about the sabotage. And while we could radio for help—”
I laughed. We could. A lot of use it would be.
Not everybody grew up in space, and not everybody knows that the distress signal, traveling at the speed of light, would take so long to reach anybody who could help us that I was too lazy even to do the calculations about how many centuries that would be. If we wanted the salvage credit, and we actually cared about the multiple murders done to a gang of professional murderers and also, their professional murder of the Ativahika, at that . . . well, we were towing the wastrel thing home. Because by the time we got back to the Core and reported it and turned Singer over to the authorities for his stint as a Designated Representative in the Congress of the Synarche, somebody else probably would have turned up and carted the damned thing off.
Of course, if he wasn’t such a political hobbyist, he could have gotten through his entire existence without being selected for service. Or that particular service, anyway.
I said, “What we all know, and none of us are saying, is that somebody sabotaged the prize for a reason.”
“I’m a little uncomfortable thinking of it as a prize,” Connla admitted, breaking the tension enough that I laughed. “But yes, the toggle was Earth-human manufacture, wasn’t it?”
“Marked in just English, too,” I said.
Connla looked at me. “I’m not an engineer. What does that mean?”
“Generally,” I said, “you’ll find standard equipment intended for general human use marked in Hindi, Spatois, English, Spanish, Chinese, Novoruss, and generally one or two others. Korean and Swahili are popular. Trade languages that a lot of people speak, on a lot of worlds.”
I looked down at my mismatched hands again, and forced myself to look away. The cobweb light show was like a magnet—a thing on my body that should not be there. I wanted to scratch at it, dig it out.
The film, at least, would keep that from happening.
“Freeporters operate exclusively in English,” Singer said.
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s a kind of fetish with them. Dates back to some race-purity nonsense that didn’t make any sense two hundred ans ago and makes even less so now.”
Connla said, “So the saboteurs were pirates.”
“Or got their gear from pirates.”
He nodded slowly. “And if you were a pirate, you wouldn’t be wiring a kill switch into an abattoir ship out of altruism and a willingness to martyr yourself on behalf of the murdered Ativahikas.”
“No, you’d be planning to wait there until your friends showed up and take all that lovely asura and asura precursor and sell it for your own benefit, wouldn’t you?”
He groaned. “And since the means of sabotage was manually operated—right?”
“Right. As far as I could tell.”
“The saboteur might in fact still be somewhere on the prize.”
“Guiding their friends in,” Singer added.
“The ship that nearly hit us,” Connla said.
I nodded. “We should probably do whatever we’re doing really fast. And I hate to remind you of this, but we still don’t have the fly-by-wire operational, and I really don’t want to go back over to a ship that’s full of . . . the . . .” mutilated remains of a sentient.
Connla, for once in his life, didn’t grab the opportunity to take me down a peg. He just pursed his lips while he thought, then sighed.
♦ ♦ ♦
I couldn’t go into a suit with the isolation film on, so it was Connla who went back over to the Milk Chocolate Marauder, and it was he who managed to finish the job of manually splicing their white drive into our controls, while I looked over his shoulder in senso and gave him a lot of instructions and advice. Some of it was probably useful. He even managed to accomplish this without contracting some alien plague, which as far as he was concerned gave him bragging rights over me until the end of eternity.
He found some further evidence of sabotage—more splices and disturbed panels—but nothing affecting the drive. And the drive, conveniently, was a pretty standard Saolara model that was cross-compatible with our command module. So Singer didn’t actually have to learn their language after all; he just flashed their bios with a Saolara kit we carried for basically that purpose, and he was in.
This was a good thing, because we could fit inside their field. They couldn’t fit inside ours, and theirs was too big even to manipulate with ours. So this was the only way we stood a chance of getting them home in several dozen human lifetimes.
> We needed a rigid attachment to take them into white space with us—or to be swept along in their field, more precisely. Functionally, the two ships would become one, Singer acting like a command module to the much larger Milk Chocolate Marauder. It was a good thing nothing about anything that took place in the Big Sneeze—the Big Suck, as Connla called it—required aerodynamics. And most of it wouldn’t even need a lot of structural strength.
We encountered the dead Ativahika twice more while he worked and I supervised, after we managed to unfold the gravitational anomaly. The unnatural massive spot in the universe was gone, but Singer and the prize vessel were still the most massive things out here in the middle of the cold and the dark.
Singer said the Ativahika’s orbit was no longer stable, and once we towed the prize away, the corpse would drift off. I wished there were some way we could bring it back. It seemed terribly cold to leave it alone out here.
Maybe the Ativahikas would see it differently. They were generally recognized as intelligent—operating cooperatively and so on—but from what I’d heard nobody had ever managed to talk to one. Would the Ativahika’s family miss it? Would they mourn its absence and long for closure, as a human family would? Did they even have concepts for those things?
I hated looking at it, anyway, so every time it spun past, I concentrated on Singer and Connla and technical things. It didn’t matter anyway: once we left, it was going to be spending an eternity out here, alone. And Connla was out there spacewalking inside a white bubble with a laser welding torch, sacrificing our tow derrick in order to join two ships into one ungainly one.
It didn’t bear thinking on, and I was intentionally not thinking about it while Connla welded the penultimate connection and floated back on his safety cables to admire his craftsmanship. It looked like nice work, too, with a join like a ridged, raised welt.
He was planning on dropping one more weld—adding a little cross bracing, which would still be kind of minimal but at least give the derrick some lateral rigidity—but the progress so far was as solid as anything I could have done. I looked from the galaxy sprawled across the sky to the galaxy spreading through my skin, and felt an odd shimmer of proximity. You know that feeling like somebody is watching you? That awareness of another person in the room?
Ancestral Night Page 7