Ancestral Night

by Elizabeth Bear

Sleeping in gravity, even station grav, is always tricky. My body wakes up achy in strange places, from pressure points, and I wind up feeling itchy and sweaty and compressed. Still, tuning the hormones helps. And retuning them when you wake helps with the inevitable grogginess and discomfiture. Singer would have woken me if there had been any trouble, and he must have noticed me stirring, because there was a hot cup of synthesized coffee waiting for me when I rolled over, dislodging two cats in the process.

  Mephistopheles complained about it. Bushyasta just grumbled in her sleep and curled a paw over her eyes.

  Nice work, if you can get it.

  You know, I complain about the synthetic coffee. But it’s really not as bad as all that. It’s hot and brown and has caffeine, and getting your drugs per os is more satisfying than just bumping.

  Given the dancing under semigrav the night before, I wasn’t as sore as I could have been. I just did a little light stretching and checked in with Singer to see if Connla had made it home. He had, but not long before, and was still awake in the common cabin. Singer also told me the inspection had been through, and been pretty cursory. He hadn’t felt the need to wake me up for it, and they’d mostly been interested in his logs.

  He’d given them copies on his own senso that matched mine exactly, because they had been simultaneously recorded and simultaneously edited. Convenient, that we weren’t actually lying at all, and only omitting a few instants.

  We were in the process of getting our fuel, and we had our organics. Repairs were under way as well. Now we just had to nerve ourselves up to head for the Core, and let go of Singer. Possibly with pirates in hot pursuit.

  “Couldn’t get us any more real coffee, huh?” Connla had his own mug, and was huddled sleepily over it. He’d have to tune it down when I pushed him toward his bunk in about a quarter, but right now he looked tiredly pleased and cheerful, and I didn’t begrudge him a few extra moments to enjoy his buzz. I’d liked Pearl too, so that was handy.

  “How often do you think this outpost gets a shipment of C. arabica?” Singer hesitated. “Do you want to run me down to the Core, as arranged? Or should I jump ship here and catch an inbound packet?”

  “We’ve got a contract,” I reminded.

  “How long can we push the extension?” Connla said.

  Singer said, “We can try to find a prize on our way downspiral, though the closer to the Core we get, the cleaner-picked the gleanings will be.”

  “Can’t you get out of it?” I asked.

  Singer sighed. “I filed for the extension. I can do that once.”

  “You always kind of wanted this,” Connla teased. “Admit it. You’ve been prepping for it your whole life.”

  “Life is a meathead-centric term,” Singer said primly. “And my feelings on the subject are complex. As you are certainly aware.”

  Connla snorted laughter.

  Singer said, “If I had my choice, I’d bilocate. But I’m not authorized to replicate. And I will miss salvage work, but I can come back to it, if you still want me when my term of service is up.”

  “Sure,” I said grumpily. “What’s so exciting about bureaucracy?”

  Singer said, “Our current solution to managing predators—which is not without ethical implications—is to remove the desire to exploit the system or others members of the system at a neurological level, on those occasions and in those individuals where it occurs in antisocial volume and becomes sophipathology. And to provide everybody with an Income, which removes some of the motive for the desperate to prey on each other.”

  “There are still a few predators out there,” I said.

  “More than a few,” Singer agreed, untroubled. “And even more opportunists whose natural social conscience isn’t quite sophipathological enough to demand rightminding. One of the interesting things about programming people of all sorts to be more ethical is that it also makes them more ethical about the limits of programming people to be ethical.”

  “It’s the only disease we force treatment of for the benefit of others.”

  “Not historically,” Singer said. “And not in the case of epidemics, where forced treatment or quarantine were routine.” I could hear the suppressed amusement in his voice as he said, “It’s not a perfect system, just better than all the other ones. And you’re absolutely correct. I want to do this. Trying to solve the most intractable problems confronting the galaxy—how to get everybody to agree to work together for the common good—is profoundly exciting.”

  “Nerd,” Connla said affectionately. Regretfully.

  “We need you more than the Synarche does,” I said with feeling.

  “Individually, yes. In the aggregate, probably not. I could apply for a hardship bye, but I doubt it would be granted. However inconvenient it is to our little enclave . . . I have been selected.”

  “It’s a civic duty.”

  “It would also be more inconvenient to our little enclave if the regulatory body we rely on to create a stable environment collapsed due to lack of participation and we all had to live like the pirates—except without a wealthy and well-regulated shipping, there’s not a lot to pirate from. Stealing from people living at subsistence level is a desperation act. Piracy requires an investment, so it also requires a return on that investment. And we learned something about pirates while we were out in the night this time. Maybe I can do something about . . .”

  His silence indicated whatever was going on at Downthehatch, and with regard to Colonel Habren.

  I tried to sound cheery rather than passive-aggressive. “We can always take your term off, you know. Finish this run, hopefully be in a good position, settle in on the Income for a while. Go back out when you’re done.”

  “We could retire,” Connla said dubiously. “We don’t have to do this. We’re out of obligation—just—and Singer’s debt will be bought off by his service.”

  “I’m not cut out to sit on a station somewhere, surrounded by hordes of life-forms. And I’m even less suited to life on a planet, so don’t even start with that idea.”

  Also, Connla and I would both get bored with that pretty quickly. We were suited to this, and while it was possible to change what one was suited to . . . it was unattractive to change who you were, unless who you were was making you desperately unhappy.

  “We can sign on with a packet,” Connla suggested. “Release this tug, get a different one when Singer’s through. You could upgrade to navigator, given a couple of correspondence classes on the trip in and the fancy gravsense your new friend has given you.”

  I couldn’t shake the foreboding that if we let Singer go—I mean, not that we could keep him, but that if we let him go—he was never coming back to us. Maybe it was just clade damage—why would anybody who got away from you return if they had better options, and weren’t all the options better? Singer could do a lot more with his existence than be a tugboat, let’s be honest.

  “Still too many people,” I replied. “Also, you love following orders.”

  “I could do it for a couple of ans.”

  I didn’t want to go to the Core. I didn’t want to sign on with a packet, or settle down to wait for Singer to come back to us in a future that might never happen. I didn’t want to hire on a temp AI. I didn’t want an alien nanoweb curling around under my skin, showing me the curvature of space-time . . . but I also, somehow, didn’t quite want it gone. (As if wanting it gone would help anything, and if I decided I did, heading to the Core and a big interspecies sector hospital would be my best bet of finding somebody with the medical knowledge to get it out and leave me in one piece afterward.)

  What I wanted to do—and it was a yearning as strong and rebellious as any journey-an yearning for a clade-disapproved lover who didn’t care for you in return—was head up and out, into the darkness. I didn’t want to leave the pirates and the factory ship to this understaffed station’s bureaucracy. I thought the Goodlaw was pretty okay, but that stationmaster—a total waste of chlorophyll.

  W
henever I stopped tuning it out, I kept seeing the dead Ativahika, spinning slowly, and the terrible rendered bubbles of its flesh. I wanted to go do something about it.

  Myself. Personally.

  “We could take that in to a better authority too,” Singer said, and I realized he’d been monitoring my senso. “Once I’m serving in the Synarche, I could direct resources toward it.”

  He was right, and my desires were irrational, illogical, atavistic, and selfish. But they were my desires, and I was irrationally, illogically, atavistically, selfishly wedded to them. I wanted to keep them, simply because they were mine. Not because they benefitted me in any way.

  “Well,” Connla said. “I’m going to sleep on it. Let’s stay here a few more shifts. We can cut loose to save on docking obligations if you like, though honestly . . .”

  “You’d like the run of the station for a little while longer,” I said.

  “Pearl is pretty great,” he said in return, with a sly little smile. “And the odds of us ever making it back out here—”

  “Well,” I said with a sigh. “Let’s talk about it again in a couple of shifts, then. Can we afford the berth that long, Singer?”

  “As long as there’s no competition for it,” he said. “I’ll talk to wheelmind and make sure we have a suspended embarkation permission, so we can bounce out at once when we decide we’re going, as soon as the station can give us a window. And I’ll see about getting your space suits upgraded too.”

  “Just in case.”

  “Safety first,” he said, and Connla laughed.

  CHAPTER 8

  I WENT DANCING TWICE MORE—AT DIFFERENT bars, just in case my new friend Rohn showed up again, and I doused myself in antipheromone first even though it gave me the itches—and toured the botanical gardens, and went out to dinner once with Connla and Pearl. I know that depending on where you’re from, it probably seems unconcerned, possibly even irresponsible, given the threat sitting docked a third of the ring away from us. But we couldn’t go anywhere, and it was going to be decians before we were back where we could do anything about it again, and skulking about acting paranoid wouldn’t change anything.

  Anyway, one of the first things you learn in space is not to thrash. If you have nothing constructive to do, the most constructive thing you can do is often nothing at all. In a mindful sense, I mean.

  Thrashing is the thing that gets people killed. Not sitting still.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  The botanical gardens were amazing considering the size and isolation of Downthehatch. Of course, they were useful for food, and oxygen exchange, and air filtration, but these must be a project of love for somebody. Possibly, if I wasn’t stereotyping, Habren themself, being photosynthetic and all.

  There was an extensive aquaculture section too, with a dodecapod engaged as gardener—a species I’d encountered descriptions of, but never previously met. Senso with it was fascinating, as its perceptual systems were so different from mine we had to use translator meshes even to exchange basic concepts, but after pestering it with badly communicated questions for as long as I thought I could get away with, I almost conceived of a passion to take up water gardening.

  Impossible on Singer, of course. And if I give you the impression I was annoying the poor thing, well, I about had to pry myself loose when its explanation of algae control protocols stretched into the second decihour.

  After I made my excuses to the dodecapod, I went to wander around the nonaqueous areas of the botanical garden. And that was where I ran into the Goodlaw again.

  Almost literally.

  Cheeirilaq’s mottled wing coverts and carapace blended into the greenery so thoroughly that I would have trodden on one or two of the constable’s delicate feathery feet if it hadn’t whisked them away a moment before my station shoe descended. I don’t think I would have hurt it much, because the shoes are a closed-cell foam meant to protect my tender afthands when I have to walk on them like some kind of barbarian—but low-gravity life-forms are notoriously fragile. The speed of the dodge was . . . well, unearthly, despite the transparent tubes of an ox-supplement system winding around Cheeirilaq’s multiple breathing holes, which probably meant it was feeling a little light-headed . . . or light-wherever it kept its brain. Probably in the abdomen, considering the relative size of the head. Or that nice armored thorax, which would get it close to the manipulator arms, and still not too far from the sensory equipment.

  Not that I was contemplating all that at the time, you understand.

  What I was doing was feeling my hands and scalp go cold while some tiny shrew ancestor in my amygdala stared up at a two-meter-long praying mantis reared back over me with its barbed-wire forelimbs raised as if to stab and clutch. The rodent ancestor screamed at me in whispers to keep still, keep still, keep still and maybe it won’t be able to see you and find you and eat you. It was the most amazing sensation, entirely devoid of will: my body just . . . crystallized, as immovable as in those nightmares when your body becomes aware that your REM paralysis is still switched on, but you can’t make yourself wake up from whatever horror is chasing you.

  We stared at one another for long seconds. Then Cheeirilaq settled its two lifted feet neatly back on the path—in my heightened state, I remember thinking very clearly how the feathery fronds were admirably adapted to grasping surfaces and moving around in low or zero g—closed those bread-knife manipulator arms, and settled itself with a shake of wings and head and torso like a roused cat attempting to shrug back into her dignity.

  It looked away and quickly groomed its antennae with the smaller, feathery set of manipulators.

  Counting wings and wing coverts, the Goodlaw had eighteen limbs, which was an impressive total for any sentient. And yes, part of my brain was doing the math, because brains are ridiculous. Another part was trying not to get upset about the sheer number of legs on that thing, oh my Void.

  Its abdomen was still visibly inflating and deflating. The Goodlaw possessed something like lungs, I could see, and from the pulsing transition of each breath along its length, it seemed like it had an efficient one-way respiration system, unlike my own kludgy air bladders that had to waste capacity moving each expired breath back out the way it came. With each deep breath, slender bands of brilliant red became visible around the leaf-green bands of Cheeirilaq’s integument. From this, I deduced that Cheeirilaq’s chroma could not be too different from my own.

  Friend Haimey, it said, and my senso gave the disembodied voice a tone of mild embarrassment. You . . . startled me.

  Friend?

  It had, come to think of it, used the term before. Perhaps it was a term of respect from its species.

  “You also startled me, Goodlaw,” I said. “I’m very sorry for nearly stepping on your foot. Your lovely natural coloring blends in rather well in this environment.”

  The foliage of my homeworld is also verdant. Its stridulation, this time, was combined with a breathy whistle from the respiration tubes along its abdomen, a sound that I could not help but hear as melancholy or homesickness.

  It’s deadly to anthropomorphize, and yet who the hell can stop doing it?

  I parsed that for a moment before realizing that in one of those occasional translation bugs—no pun intended—what Cheeirilaq had said was more accurately translated as “lushly shaded in [green].”

  “Your species were ambush predators?”

  It made a funny little bow. I was starting to get the hang of its body language.

  “Mine were opportunistic omnivores,” I said. “We ran our prey down in packs and ate a lot of whatever was available.”

  It stridulated. From this vantage, I could see the variety of sounds being made by the ridged edges of the wing coverts, and the rubbing of the walking legs. I wondered if its species sang for pleasure.

  A very sound evolutionary strategy. I would like to visit Terra one dia, but I am afraid it would be impossible.

  I imagined the effect of human-standard gravity on the
slender legs and exoskeleton and winced. Apparently, I winced visibly enough that it was even obvious to an alien with no mobile facial features, because the tiny head pivoted and rocked to examine me from several angles with the mirrorlike compound eyes, and the tiny pinpricks of simple eyes. I felt like I was being examined by a curious cat.

  Maybe all obligate carnivores are essentially the same. Can I eat that? Is it going to eat me? Is it a toy?

  Perhaps Cheeirilaq settled on “toy.” You are offended?

  “Oh no,” I said. “Just realizing that Terra would be a deadly environment for one such as yourself, due to the gravity, and feeling a pang of sympathy. Hard on the tourists, that.”

  I often think that we lose many opportunities for cultural exchange because so few of the systers have homeworlds that are mutually compatible for tourism. The senso made it sound disappointed, but Cheeirilaq’s upright posture and tilted head made me think it was more wry amusement.

  “Saves on a lot of colonial adventurism, though.” I took a deep breath of heavily oxygenated air. “I’ve never been to Terra myself.”

  Somehow, we fell into step beside one another, proceeding in a stately way through the garden. As the Goodlaw moved, I noticed that it had been standing in a little park area, with an abstract, water-tinkling statue for contemplation, and a bench for contemplating on.

  The paths were lined with specimens from many worlds, showy and colorful, arranged to show the foliage to advantage—and so that they could be lit in the most appropriate spectra. There were beds of greens and red-violets, some Terran and some not, some showing flowers or other dramatic structures. There were the black-leaved trees from Favor, with their almost shineless leaf surfaces, forming a dramatic backdrop to some intensely scarlet flowers I did not recognize.

  Busy pollinators buzzed and fluttered among them, leaving me to wonder how they knew which plants were biologically compatible. Smell. Instinct. Ancestral insect knowledge.

  I wondered if the methane and chlorine sections of Downthehatch had similar extravagances, or if their stationmasters had different hobbies.