I said, “What about the cats?”
“If we die of space poison, Singer will get them home and take care of them somehow, I’m sure. And if they get space poison too, he’ll download himself out of the vessel and ditch it into the nearest sun. Right, Singer?”
Singer said, “You two are terribly irresponsible.”
“Primates,” Connla said with a shrug. “We are what we are. What are you going to do?”
“Wait,” I said. “I’m irresponsible? This is Connla’s idea.”
“Are you going to do it?” Singer asked.
I contemplated my half-eaten tube of spaghetti. Mephistopheles patted my shoulder again. She was chasing the sparkles as much as she was begging for sauce. “Do you think I shouldn’t?”
Singer made a wordless sound that was his equivalent of a shrug. “I am not equipped to assess the impact of biological inconveniences upon meatforms.”
He was definitely teasing.
Gently, I pushed the cat off. She went one way—toward a nice upholstered bulkhead because I’m not a monster—and I floated, in reaction, toward the forward port. The early astronauts had to argue to get windows, I’m told. Now I looked out of this one, frowning down at the long, barred spiral curve of the galaxy we needed to move toward the center of—a center that was much smaller and farther away than we had ever meant for it to be.
“I don’t want to die in a bubble,” I said.
Connla said, “We won’t do any transfusions.”
“Hah.” But it was decided, and he helped me peel off my isolation skin.
♦ ♦ ♦
The closest port was likely to be a pirate outpost, which tended to be scattered in the trailing reaches of the galaxy. Off the beaten track, protected and concealed. That wouldn’t help us, because we didn’t know where it was, couldn’t find it, and didn’t have anything to trade once we got there. But there were fringe worlds and fringe stations, places where respectable people mingled with the galactic underbelly. Those wouldn’t be without Synarche oversight. Anyplace where we could get in contact with civilization, we could trade. We didn’t have a prize, but we had knowledge, and our information on pirate and harvester activity—and what little we had on the artificial gravity—would get us help and repairs.
We set our sights on Downthehatch, which we could probably just about reach. Maybe. It was a dodgy little place by reputation, but it was worth a try, given the alternatives. I was uneasy enough about it that I might have voted the other way if I hadn’t already known that Singer and Connla had their minds made up. I know gray markets will always exist, but I have an allergy to people who took from the commonwealth and who also sold it out to predators.
“You’re not trading my skin,” I said.
“We’ll tell anybody who asks that it’s a holotoo,” Connla promised. “Garlynoch work. I’ve seen some of their stuff. It could pass as a really nice one.”
Singer said, “Unless you decide you want a more rigorous medical intervention than I can provide.”
Once under way again, we didn’t have much to do. I read a few nineteenth-century novels in Russian, Japanese, and English. They’re great for space travel because they were designed for people with time on their hands. Middlemarch. Gorgeous, but it just goes on.
The early word-processor era around the turn of the Earth millennium is good for that too, but the quality of the prose in those generally isn’t as high. Some of those epics, though, run to ten or twenty volumes, and every volume in them is thirty hours of reading time.
I even own a paper book—a compact, ultralight, onionskin volume with real fiber pages. It dates from the last third of the twentieth, and it’s called Illuminatus! I keep it because it was a gift, and it’s not so much a keepsake as . . . a kind of reminder. Of a time when I was really dumb.
It’s the one book on hand I never read anymore.
Connla studied strategy games, those favored by Synarche syster species and even, when he could find them, those invented by other aliens. Fortunately, Singer liked them too, so I had never been forced to learn the ins and outs (literally) of a-akhn-an or three-dimensional Goishan go. Which looks to me more like Chinese checkers anyway.
Long-haul flyers need hobbies. I know one AI on a salvage vessel who took up writing 3D scripts and interactives. She did so well she quit the salvage business and went off to live in the AI equivalent of a luxe beach home, some computronium colony around a dwarf star in the Core, with all the company, low lag times, processing cycles, and lack of travel you could want.
She—or a sub, anyway—got back into salvage a few ans later. The story as I heard it goes that she couldn’t write anymore, with all that stimulation, so in order to maintain her lifestyle, she had to near-isolate a branch of herself to get some damned writing done.
Still, nice work if you can get it.
I was floating near a viewport with my screen and Jane Eyre. It’s kind of horrifying to think of an era when people were so constrained to and by gender, in which the externals you were born with were something you would be stuck with your whole life, could never alter, and it would determine your entire social role and your potential for emotional fulfillment and intellectual achievement. So I wasn’t really reading. I was thinking about social history (I grew up in a human-female isolationist clade, and since I left it’s given me a powerful aversion to species and gender absolutists) and watching the bands of lensed light ripple by, wondering if it was getting a little brighter out there. The folded sky could be hypnotizing.
I realized that I could feel those folds and lenses on my skin.
They felt like—like ripples in a wave tank, passing over me as I lay just under the surface. A sense of pressure, and then a sense of suction, behind. Not like a touch, exactly. More like something passing near your skin, close enough that the sensory hairs can feel it, but it doesn’t brush your body exactly. Or like when you’re tuned into somebody else’s senso and getting what they’re getting, only at a remove.
“Koregoi senso,” I muttered, making a fist with my right hand. It shimmered in response.
I concentrated, closing my eyes. Something under the lensing ripples, something shadowy and vast. Convoluted. Arcing, sliding, gliding—
Singer said flatly, “I made a mistake.”
It took me a few seconds to blink back into myself. In that time, Connla had pulled himself out of his study hood and floated over. “What kind of a mistake?”
“We don’t have the fuel to get to Downthehatch before you and the cats starve to death. Or rather, we do. But then we couldn’t brake. Even if we recycle and reprint every organic object on this ship, including the cats and your own bodily waste.”
“We’re not eating the cats,” Connla said.
“They’ll eat you,” Singer pointed out.
Connla and I both shrugged. Cats were predators. Once you stopped being warm, you were just a source of calories. That was their moral calculus.
I said, “How is this possible?”
“I don’t know. I’m running diagnostics now—” He cleared his nonexistent throat. “So it looks like one of the storage tanks was damaged when we were shot off the prize. Sensors were damaged. They didn’t register it, and didn’t register the leak. But there’s less fuel than there should be.”
“Not to get nitpicky,” I said, “but what if we ditched enough mass to compensate?”
“We don’t have enough ditchable mass to do that with. There’s not a lot of Singer going spare.”
This was true, and a drawback of the recycle-and-print model we were operating on. Connla and I looked at each other. I said, “Well. There’s no point in decelerating now. Let’s stop adding v and just keep going, and try to think of a solution before we become an ironic footnote to salvage tug history, shall we?”
♦ ♦ ♦
We went to our separate corners to muse, and mope, and stare thoughtfully out the viewports. Keeping ourselves occupied.
In the face of the un
thinkable, there wasn’t much else to do except think about it obsessively. And sometimes, staring out the window turned out to be effective, as I discovered when something finally tickled my awareness just long enough to be useful.
I looked up, and with my fingertips, turned myself around.
“I have a solution,” I announced. I put more conviction in it than I was really sure it deserved.
“It’s better than being part of the precipitate,” Connla replied, but it was habitual and his heart wasn’t in it. He gazed at me with the sort of interest one reserves for reprieves from the guillotine and similarly refocusing events. “Let’s hear it.”
I held my hands out into the light so the gently moving webwork would sparkle. My clademothers were going to have a fit if they ever saw me again. We had a doctrine against body modification even for noncosmetic health or professional reasons, and even when I’d broken with them, I’d never gone out of my way to mod up. Except the zero-g adaptations, of course.
Now here I was covered in rainbow holograms.
Oh well. I wasn’t about to go looking for them. And if we ran into each other by chance—the sort of thing that inevitably happened in the biggest of universes—maybe I would get lucky and they wouldn’t recognize me.
“Guys, I seem to be developing some new senses.”
They—or at least Connla—gaped at me, so I unlocked my fox and tuned them in to my senso to prove it.
We hung there together like three ships in formation while I projected them into the tactile map of what I was perceiving. Singer figured out what I was up to pretty fast and took over rendering the feelings into a visualization. His version came out rather more accurate than mine, and faster too, as he had the cycles to throw at it.
All around us, the swoops and spirals of a convoluted landscape shivered into being. Singer’s sense of humor being what it was—the opposite of vestigial, though you’d never get to me admit that in his hearing—he decorated the projection with the traditional lines and circles of gravmap wireframe. Because it was a gravmap, and I was feeling the curvature of space-time it indicated—at a distance—through my skin.
Of the things that bind the universe together, gravity is not a particularly strong force, as it happens. It just . . . never stops reaching. That always sort of made me feel good about gravity. It’s always looking for the next rock, always sliding something down a breaker in space-time, whipping something in a long, arcing curve around something else. Gravity doesn’t give up. It keeps on trucking.
I won’t get into any solemn metaphorical particulars about the human spirit here, but you see what I’m driving at. I just really like gravity as a concept. As much as I hate having to operate under its influence.
I could tell from the way Singer was studying the map that he was feeling pretty positive about gravity too, just now.
“We can take a shortcut,” he said, thinking out loud for our benefit.
“You mean, use the existing folds in space-time to work with the drive compression, rather than brute-forcing across it. The old gravity whip trick, except in white space.”
“Gravity’s water slide,” Connla said, with the sense of a grin.
“Technically, all water slides are gravity’s,” Singer said. “Yes, Haimey. This should be enough to get us home. Within your projected lifetimes, based on available resources. And without eating the cats.”
CHAPTER 6
THE CATS, BEING CATS, WERE suitably ungrateful for their reprieve. By the time I got to check on them, Bushyasta was asleep next to the fridge, her paw hooked into a nylon grab loop. She had earned her name the old-fashioned way, by living up to it.
I had no idea where Mephistopheles had wandered off to.
I edged around Bushyasta and fixed myself a bubble of coffee, feeling relieved that the banter between Connla and me had picked back up in a much more natural and unstrained fashion. It was still going to take us a really long time to get home. A subjective eternity, I realized, as Singer started talking about his political theories again.
Still, not dying made up for a lot.
“Thanks, parasite,” I muttered.
The parasite didn’t answer.
Coffee is amazing, and one benefit of having only cats, an AI, and another human as shipmates is that I can drink it in public areas without grossing out the aliens. Something about the organic esters makes it smell—and taste—vile to just about every other ox-breathing syster I might find myself sharing an atmosphere with, so it’s considered polite to keep that particular stimulant among humans. People coming off the homeworlds are always a little frustrated that it’s considered incredibly rude to walk around with coffee everywhere they go.
This particular serving was the real stuff, too—some beans we keep, unroasted and green so they go stale less quickly, mostly for off-the-books barter with other humans when we need it, but also for special occasions. It’s so much better than the recon I usually wind up drinking that it might as well not even be the same plant.
Not dying was probably a special occasion, so I waited patiently for the cracking sounds and wisps of aroma as Singer roasted me a bubble’s worth of beans, flash-cooled them, scrubbed the smoke, and ground them up for me, then dispensed measured hot water and centrifuged the result to get the grounds out. It was delicious, and the caffeine buzzed pleasantly across my nerves, and I let it ride. Human beings have been bumping and tuning since we first learned how to chew bitter leaves for the alkaloid high; we’re just better at the nuances now.
I was just about to pick up Jane Eyre again, having nothing particular to do for the next couple of decians, when Singer cleared his throat and said, “Thank you for this map, Haimey.”
I let the screen float near me, but hung on to my coffee. If I set it aside, it would probably float there forgotten until it cooled, and this stuff was too good to waste. I savored a sip and said, “You’re welcome.”
“Maps like this would have some value, too,” he said diffidently.
“In more than one way.” I waved at the blurs of light outside, which were now contorting and lensing in rippled tortoiseshell patterns as Singer coasted us around the rim of some giant gravity well. We were accelerating again, too, though I couldn’t feel it through the ship. The parasite was keeping me informed, though, as I was learning to read the information this new sense was feeding me.
We had just become the only ship in the Synarche—as far as I knew—that could navigate and course-correct while in white space.
I didn’t have time to really let the implications sink in, because I was busy running for my life and the lives of my best friends. But I knew it changed everything; it would speed up transit times, make it easier to correct after critical failures like the spin out of control that had gotten us here in the first place, possibly even put Singer and Connla and me out of a job by improving safety in white space and making it that much less likely that ships would get trapped inside white bubbles and not be able to find their way home.
It would have military implications as well. What if a ship could fight without leaving white space? Attack another vessel en passant? Bombard a fragile, infinitely vulnerable planet?
Worlds . . . were so terribly easy to destroy.
That would make us all the more desirable to the pirates as a prize, if they found out about it.
Well, that was a problem for another dia.
“I don’t follow,” Singer said.
“Don’t you think being able to get there faster on less fuel would be of benefit to us when competing with other tugs?”
“Hmm.” I figured he was running calculations on where the greatest social and personal benefits were.
I was wrong.
“I was just thinking,” Singer said slowly, “of what an operation like ours would have been able to accomplish, even a centad or two ago. So many ships used to get lost.”
“We’re still pulling some of them back,” I reminded him.
“Can you imagine comi
ng out here in all this dark in a sublight ship?” he asked. “Most of the generation ships have never been even located, let alone recovered.”
“Generation ships,” I echoed, feeling a chill.
“At the Eschaton,” Singer said, “various Earth organizations—groups, sects, and even nation-states—sent out generation ships in a desperate bid to save some scrap of humanity, because the best-case scenario did not seem as if it would leave the homeworld habitable for long. One hundred seventy-three ships are known to have made it at least as far as the edge of the solar system.”
“Like stations, with no primary. Just . . . sort of drifting along, trying to be totally self-sufficient.”
“Yes,” he said.
It was a terrifying risk, a desperation gamble, and we both paused to appreciate it.
Then I said, “But Earth didn’t die.”
“Earth didn’t die,” Singer said. “But those generation ships did. As far as we know, anyway—their planned paths have been searched, once it became trivial to do so, but very few have been recovered.”
Connla looked up from his game board. One hand was resting carelessly inside the projection, and it made him look like his arm was half-amputated.
“Waste it,” Connla breathed. “They lost all of them?”
“One made it,” Singer said. “Sort of. But the people and the shipmind within it had changed too much to be integrated back into society. They took another way out.”
Connla said, “Suicide?”
“They transubstantiated,” Singer said. “Went into machine mind, totally, and took off in swarms of some Koregoi nanotech to inhabit the cosmos.”
“So, suicide,” I said. “With some plausible deniability built in.”
“Apparently,” Singer said, “the tech they were using allowed continuity of experience across platforms.”
“Continuity of experience,” I said. “But the thoughts themselves necessarily change, from meat-mind to machine.”
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