Ancestral Night

by Elizabeth Bear

  Like snacks, for example.

  Pity that wasn’t available to me now, because I could have used it.

  As I swung through narrow spaces, I wondered: the Koregoi parasite seemed so happy in my body, and had certainly revved my metabolism well beyond the usual bounds. We drank the same solvents. Breathed the same oxidant. If my biochemistry matched up that well with theirs, did that mean I could eat their food without harming myself? Were we biologically similar enough to process the same nutrients?

  I really hoped so. A lot.

  I decided to gamble that my attempt to hide myself had worked. I needed intel badly. Using my Koregoi-extended proprioception—or rather, letting it use me—I tracked where Farweather was as I moved through the ship mapping and exploring. I was pretty sure that I’d been right about her plan, because while I was drunkard-walking all over the place, making largely random choices in order to get a vague plan of as much of the ship as possible, Farweather was moving in a tight spiral out from a central core, a planned and cautious exploration.

  She didn’t seem to be hiding herself, either. Maybe she didn’t know how. Maybe I only thought I was invisible, or somewhat less noticeable anyway, and she knew exactly where I was at all times and was laughing at my completely random stagger through the Prize’s byways.

  It didn’t matter. Well, it did matter. But I couldn’t affect it either way, so I needed to not concern myself with it. It didn’t matter because it was out of my control, and my energy needed to go to things that I could control, or at least hope to affect the outcome of. See above, item one, Haimey Dz survival plan for being marooned on an alien starship while trying to hide from a sexy pirate.

  I really, really wished I had along a copy of Robinson Crusoe.

  I crawled and mapped, floated and mapped, avoided Farweather’s territory. I slept in corners and access tunnels and stowage bays, never the same one twice, and tried to leave behind no evidence of my passage. And tried also not to notice how hungry I was getting, as the first couple of diar went by.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Goal number two: find something to eat, somewhere.

  Between what I put out, and the atmospheric moisture, my suit was reclaiming enough water that I wasn’t in danger of dehydrating, and I’d rigged up a small evaporation still to make sure I was getting uncontaminated water with which I could replenish. Who knew what might be in H2O that has been sitting in the pipes for a few hundred ans? I had a pretty good handle on the schematics of the Prize, including—I hoped—a number of things Farweather didn’t know, because she didn’t often venture out of her fortified bubble. I’d spied on her a little, and she’d filled the access tubes near her little domain with insulating foam that would have to be clawed or gouged out by hand, and she’d laced the corridors with cameras and the occasional dart trap. Fortunately, having been on the Milk Chocolate Marauder, I had a pretty fair idea of what her jury-rigging skills were like. I also thought that mine were better, and her dart traps were easy to spot. (Unless she was smart enough to hide her true level of skill and conceal a few better, which was possible. It was reasonable caution to act like that might be the case, but if I really started to believe it I would have to admit that I was probably psyching myself.)

  So I stayed off her marked turf so as not to let her know her dart traps were silly. And she didn’t venture out of her secured corridors and cabins either, which was a nicer vote of confidence in my skill and dangerousness than I had been expecting from her. Or, you know, maybe she was a homebody.

  I didn’t really think she was a homebody.

  My suit, by this point, had actually snugged down to the limit of its elasticity and was starting to hang a little loose on me. The yeast tablets were not a subsistence diet; they were a snack. And I only had a few of them left. Even rationing doesn’t make a resource last forever if you can’t figure out how to renew it.

  Second priority: food was starting to seem even more violently important.

  I hoped it wouldn’t mean raiding Farweather’s supplies, because that would put goal number two in direct contravention with goal number one—explore, avoid, reconnoiter—and it was a little early in the proceedings to be running up against strategic conflict already. Especially when I was the only commander and all the troops and noncoms, also.

  Well, if I were food on an alien colony ship, where would I be? I’d probably be long decomposed, honestly—decayed into crumbling sawdust, hydroponics dead, organics of all sorts hopelessly degraded. There was no ecosystem on this ship anymore—even the kind of incomplete oxygen-and-water cycle that we’d maintained on Singer, with our algae tanks and living walls in order to process fresh oxygen and produce fresh greens.

  If I had to kill and eat Farweather, I was starting to think I might be willing to try it, though I didn’t have anything to butcher her with. She, however, did have supplies.

  I could tell because she wasn’t dying.

  I could probably steal them from her.

  That was a terrible idea.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Wait, where was the oxygen coming from? It didn’t smell like tanks, and it didn’t smell like catalysts or electrolysis. The alien ship didn’t carry the faint tang of ozone. In fact, it smelled fresh. Green. Growing.

  Did the Koregoi have something like blue-green algae on this thing as part of their life-support processing, or was their atmosphere synthesis just good enough, technologically speaking, that they didn’t have to make everything they reconstituted smell like the inside of a tin can that had been floating around in space, unaired, for a thousand ans or so?

  If there were edible plants of some sort on this thing, eating them would be a simpler solution than trying to catch Farweather. Also less socially taboo. Which I guess matters.

  And who would bring plants that you couldn’t also eat to space, up here where weight and space were at a premium? Especially if you had a big city-ship full of hungry mouths to feed, and you might be taking them to a planet where you needed to have some kind of horticulture, too. And I’d actually found part of a hydroponics operation.

  Those hydroponics tanks were not currently functional . . . but there might be seed banks. And a way to turn them back on.

  Remembering the hydroponics made me think of Connla, and thinking of Connla made me sad, so I thought about something else. Plans. I thought about plans. Plants and plans.

  There might be an oxygen-processing center somewhere with tanks.

  Okay so. Where were the tanks? I’d been all over the ship, I thought, and had some idea of where the blank bits might be, though a reliable map would have to wait for access to rendering software and processing power. Or an AI, which amounted to the same thing.

  For now, I stretched out in a side corridor—one of the freefall ones—and thought about it. Plenty of blank space, and they probably wouldn’t need direct access. I mean, you could send a diver in to clean if you needed, but probably if they got contaminated or needed cleaning, or you wanted to harvest a crop and get the next crop in . . . wouldn’t you just pump the stuff out, dry it in sheets (vacuum freeze-drying! why not?) and then wash the tank out with a nice hot rinse and start over with a new batch immediately? Nobody should ever need to go in there except if it needed repairs.

  Well, that said to me that I should look in the dead spaces. Or in the areas around the dead spaces, for the controls.

  I had a plan. With a hungry sigh, I wedged my bundle of sleeping rags behind some pipes, fetched the space suit helmet and ox supply I hadn’t been bothering with, and I went in search of sustenance.

  And maybe a shower too while I was at it.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Six hours later I was happily munching my way through a stack of space nori as thick as a Gutenberg Bible. It could have used a little salt and some wasabi, but it hadn’t killed me yet, and on the off chance it never did, I was already in the process of making more.

  Who knew if it was nutritionally complete, or what amino acids and sug
ars the Koregoi used to build and fuel their bodies? And if those had any overlap at all with the ones I used?

  Well, malnutrition was a slower way to die than starvation. Give it a check in the plus column and move on.

  I probably contaminated the hell out of the tank with my Earth microbes while I was in there, and in memory of Singer I felt pretty bad about that, but there honestly wasn’t much I could have done to prevent it, and I was breathing commensals and microbiota all over the alien micro-ecosystem in here anyway.

  In any case, my increased level of alertness and energy told me that there was something in there that I could metabolize, and my physiology got right on that, with a vengeance.

  Other parts of my GI system weren’t as pleased with the radically unfamiliar food source, unfortunately.

  Oh well. At least my suit handled the cleanup. And reclaimed the water. Though that wasn’t as critical now that I’d found giant tanks full of perfectly bog-standard (that was a joke) H2O.

  Well, I thought it was funny, anyway. It kept me laughing to myself all the way back to my improvised dehydrator, where I planned to pack up a new crop of algae biscuits and then find a crevice to mouse myself into for a good long rest.

  Laughing made me think of my shipmates. Thinking of my shipmates made me so sad about not having Singer and Connla around to impugn my sense of humor that I could barely stand it. I could almost imagine Singer’s presence sometimes, if I closed my eyes and held very still. I knew it was just my neurology sensing people who weren’t there—I’m pretty sure nobody outside of a com serial has ever been haunted by the ghost of a destroyed AI—but that didn’t remove the creepiness of being able to sense him back there.

  If he’d been real, though, he would have brought books. So I could tell myself with a high confidence that I was kidding myself. Or that my neurons were kidding me, more precisely. And nobody was standing over my shoulder, observing me.

  Unless this was my backbrain’s method of telling my conscious mind that Farweather had found me and was stealth-piggybacking on my Koregoi senso.

  That sent a chill through me. I stopped, a flake of space nori in my hand, and looked at the webwork of glittering coppery particles swirling and washing beneath my skin. Sometime over the past couple of decians, they’d integrated into my body image and I’d stopped even consciously noticing them unless they caught my eye, or something made me think of them.

  They were still pretty. And I decided that if Farweather was camped in my blind spot, well, there wasn’t much I could do about it. Singer could have chased her out, probably. I was helpless in this circumstance.

  Dammit, Singer, I miss you. And not just for providing me with com security services.

  Maybe I was haunted, because I swear I felt a fleeting sense of contact then, like the brush of immaterial fingers on my hair.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Goal number three: figure out where we were headed.

  Subgoal: find a way to get that information to somebody who could help.

  By this time, I had a really good mental map of the ship—both machine memories and schematics courtesy of my fox, and the more intuitive sense that came with my meat memory and the good old-fashioned senses of direction, travel time, and so forth that had kept my primate ancestors from (mostly) getting lost and eaten by leopards before they could reproduce, thereby leading us inevitably and inexorably to the stars and our rightful place amid the society of the systers.

  Or, you know, blind luck and occasionally jumping really high at the right time and screaming for your friends to run away, if you don’t care to subscribe to some kind of neoimperialist Manifest Destiny for humanity. Which is one of the maladapted bits of evolutionary baggage I’m very glad we’ve mostly trained out of ourselves, now that we have the tools.

  Well, the Synarche has trained out of ourselves. The Freeporters . . . still haven’t figured out the whole “sharing resources equitably” thing.

  So. Back to the problem at hand: navigation. I had no access to a shipmind, or a shipmind’s database of star charts. I had no access to the controls of the Prize, and no idea how to fly it if I did other than what I’d done before, which amounted to standing in one place and whistling here kitty kitty. A tactic, to be sure. Not a tactic I thought I should attempt while standing inside it.

  What I did have was the Koregoi senso. So over the next couple of diar, as my body slowly adapted to a diet of space nori biscuits, I made myself a series of bolt-holes and hiding places through the vast—and now thoroughly mapped—interior. I even felt like I had a pretty good idea of what was going on in the turf Farweather had claimed as her own.

  I armed myself with a couple of flasks of water—I’d found the flasks in one of the hydroponics rooms and filled them with what I filtered from the algae tanks—and a pile of my nori cakes. Some of the nori cakes were flavored with alien shrimp bits now, which was exciting and also hadn’t killed me, and probably provided some protein. Whether it was protein my body could use or not . . . well, insert a big theatrical shrug right here.

  I tried not to think about the fact that I was eating living animals and not tank-grown meat. It was a survival situation, my ancestors (barbarians) had done it for millions of generations, and anyway they probably had like three ganglia to rub together. The shrimps, not my ancestors.

  And if I told myself that often enough, I could convince myself that they were basically little blue-green plants that just moved really quickly, and manage to get them down without having to adjust my neurochemistry too much to stop feeling like a monster.

  The worst part was that they were actually pretty tasty. I would have felt less awful if I hated their flavor overall and was just choking them down to stay functional.

  Then I holed up in one of the dens I’d located around the ship and was using as caches. I picked the one I felt most secure in: it was reasonably far from what I thought of as Farweather’s territory, and in a well-shielded forward section of the ship. Also, there was some sort of device or object in a big, sealed cargo space between it and the area where the Freeporter stayed, and that device seemed to interfere with the Koregoi senso. So while I could feel forward and off to the sides just fine, I couldn’t feel aft, toward Farweather. And I figured she couldn’t feel forward, toward me.

  This was as good a spot to try a little meditation on the shape of the universe as I was likely to find, so I settled in, loosened up my suit a bit, and made myself comfortable. Then I opened my mind to the Koregoi senso, and waited to see what might arise.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  The biggest question in my mind was Where am I, and right after that was Who’s following us and Where is the rendezvous, and what Freeport assets are waiting there? But just asking this persnickety peripheral that had infected my body for a direct answer never seemed to work. (Of course not.) So instead, I sat with it, thinking about my breathing, letting whatever thoughts wanted to arise or descend do their thing.

  Mostly they were thoughts of grief. At first, anyway. I leaned back against a bulkhead and let the sorrow rise as I imagined Connla cuddling the cats to him as space opened up all around them. Maybe fate had been merciful, and all three of them had been caught in the initial particle blast. The emotions came with tears, and a pain that hitched my breathing, and I didn’t tune to lessen it. Pain still had to be processed eventually. You could use rightminding to manage it, and to manage the sequelae of trauma. But you couldn’t just make those things go away.

  Not and expect people to have healthy brains and healthy psyches afterward. It was the equivalent of putting somebody with high blood pressure on rectifiers and not addressing the physical causes of the problem at a systemic and maintenance level as well.

  I would have given anything to find Bushyasta sleeping in the beverage heater and have to pick fur out of the little cubby before making myself a beverage that didn’t taste like cat dander. If we had a beverage heater, I would have killed for a cup of cat-dander tea. If we had any tea.


  I was cautious. So cautious. I didn’t reach out. I just . . . sat still. Held to myself. And let the universe come to me.

  The idea is to breathe, and not actually think about anything complicated with intention. Think about the breath, sure. Think about the blood carrying the oxygen through your body. Picture the pathways of your arteries and veins.

  Other thoughts will arise. Some of those thoughts will be sorrow. Some will be anger. Sometimes, there will be a flare of white rage directed at somebody close, somebody whose actions have harmed you or those you loved. Sometimes that fury might subside into grief. Sometimes it might flare into a craving for vengeance.

  The thing was, a lot of people—people in the clade I grew up in, for example—have the idea that when you seek no-mind, or what the Wake-Seekers and those who follow the Path of the Unfinished Work call waiting awareness, you are not conscious, somehow. But that is not the case. What you are doing is trying to accept what you think and feel as simply events that are occurring, rather than as intrinsic parts of who you are, demanding immediate action. You experience the emotion or thought, and you choose not to judge it or yourself, or your relationship to that emotion or thought. And when it’s done, you experience the next emotion.

  Your self-ness is defined as something different from what you feel or think at the moment—something that can be made serene and thoughtful, careful of yourself and others, respectful of community. This is not dissimilar from rightminding, to be frank, and in a more religious time, after the Eschaton that left humanity so shattered and vulnerable and nearly destroyed us, it was a philosophy that many of my ancestors adopted, which led eventually to our acceptance of—and membership in—the Synarche.

  There is an ancient concept of dharma, which means, essentially, right behavior. It includes such seemingly basic concepts as not taking more than you need, not deceiving or stealing, contributing to the well-being of other people, and not harming others in any other way as well. A number of religions and philosophies have grown up surrounding it, but I realized a long time ago that those mostly do not concern me. I’m not a religious person, though I dabbled for a while.