Ancestral Night

by Elizabeth Bear

  When I left the clade and after I was done burning myself up on synthetic deva, though, I realized that the world was a lonely place, and that it helped to have a philosophy, if nothing else, to help with the task of finding an identity.

  Bloody vengeance, unfortunately, was not dharma. So when that showed up—with annoying regularity—I needed to let it go, and work on more socially beneficial tasks. Such as coming up with that set of directions.

  I didn’t want to let the fury go, though. Not yet. I didn’t want to imagine ever letting it go, just yet. That rage, that loss—they had become integral to my identity. Letting go of them would be letting go of a piece of me, because that rage and grief . . . that rage and grief were my family, and all I had left of that family.

  All the irony of unfinished business. I’d been so afraid of losing them because life is change, and the tide was drawing us apart. And now they were gone permanently, and I was still here, and I hadn’t just lost the future I had planned for and gotten invested in (a future that had never, of course, been real, but only what seemed to me the most desirable of likely outcomes).

  The authentic experience is an illusion. Safety is an illusion too.

  So some of my fury was selfish: the fury of having been robbed of my family. The fury of being made to experience this grief, this pain, by someone else’s carelessness.

  I reminded myself that pain and grief did not have to be suffering. That loss could just be that, loss, and experienced as such, and released because the world was change and you could not hold on.

  The distinction seemed pretty academic to me just then.

  I knew I needed to let go.

  I was not ready to let go now.

  I was not ready to release my strong attachment to my friends.

  But maybe I could be ready to put the rage and sorrow away for a little while, so that I could get some work done.

  Once I had first experienced them for a little while. And by experienced, I do mean “wallowed.”

  Eventually, with a lot of practice, I did calm my mind, and fill it with the sound and sensation of my breathing and the tiny sounds rattling through the Prize’s hull. I still didn’t reach out—it was probably ridiculous, but I was concerned that the more aggressive I was in seeking information, the more likely it was that Farweather might notice me, or be able to pick up on what I was doing. The Koregoi senso sometimes fed me information about her. It was only reasonable to suppose that, likewise, it fed her information about me.

  And she was better at using the stuff than I was. Still.

  When I had finally managed to bore my persistent, argumentative brain into silence, though, what filled it was not a sense of Farweather’s presence, or even echoes of her intentions or her own senso ghosts. What I felt was, instead, what a stone might feel if dropped into a cool and limpid pool.

  I seemed to drift, and there were currents all around me. I could perceive them, and moreover I could see through them. I again had that sense that I had had earlier of being able to feel the shape of the galaxy, of the universe, as if I were stretched out on a hammock, the fabric conforming to the outlines of my body—if my body were infinite, and extended to the very edges of everything. And if my capacity to sense detail were likewise infinite, and extended to the very edges of everything.

  Our ship was a heavy place in the sky, one of many. Where we had been, the weight of the Well far outstripped it. And where we were going—

  Farweather, or the ship, was taking us no place very interesting, I realized—partly in relief and partly in disappointment. We were headed for a Freeport—we had to be, because there was nothing Synarche in this corner of the galaxy—which was bad for me. There would not be very many opportunities to bust out if we were surrounded by pirates and occupied by more pirates.

  Well, at least that encouraged me to act sooner rather than later.

  Strangely, though, the flooding of information into my receptive state was not limited to vectors and directions and potential destinations and clusters of atoms and dark gravity and other things that bent the world. There was something else out there, something I was noticing now rather than previously because . . . Well, I could come up with a lot of theories. Because I was in an extraordinarily receptive state of mind. Because the Koregoi ship was feeding me data subconsciously. Because using the Koregoi senso while sitting inside the Koregoi ship caused a lensing property.

  All kinds of explanations, as I said. But the fact of the matter was that I did not know why I was seeing what I was seeing—which was a grossly but not exactly repeating pattern of variations encoded in the dark gravity structure of the universe, on (in absolute terms) a very tiny scale.

  “Dharma in the Well, Singer,” I said under my breath. “That looks like somebody has been scratching crib notes on the cosmos. I don’t suppose you can read them, can you?”

  There was no answer, of course.

  If it was some kind of encoding, there was no way I would ever crack it without at least a shipmind to help, and better yet some attention from the massed minds and architecture of the Core. If it was just noise . . .

  . . . I didn’t think it was just noise.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Well, I wasn’t headed anyplace where I could plan on looking for help. I guessed it was just as well I hadn’t expected to find any.

  Which brought me to goal number the fourth: get the hell off this ship, or get control of it away from Farweather, before I wound up completely kidnapped by pirates, for real. (As opposed to the sort of fractional and incomplete pirate-kidnapping I was currently enjoying.)

  Get The Hell Off The Ship would have been my preference, for obvious reasons, but a pretty thorough exploration of my options didn’t fill me with confidence on that front. Jumping out of a vessel in white space wasn’t the best of ideas unless your goal was a pretty spectacular suicide. While the space-time folds, once constructed, maintained themselves without additional input—and while everything inside the white coils was, technically speaking, motionless, so you wouldn’t be left behind—in practical terms the ship was folding space-time around itself, so if you stayed in the white bubble you’d just wind up going wherever the ship was going along with it. And if you drifted out of the white bubble, you’d be folded, spindled, and mutilated as you crossed the boundary into normal space.

  A lot of larger human and syster ships—colony ships and transports—carried escape vessels with their own small white drives, so that if something noncatastrophic but disabling happened to the main vessel, crew and passengers could be evacuated by the reverse of the procedure we’d used with Singer to retrieve vessels trapped or abandoned in white space. The Prize didn’t seem equipped with anything like that, although honestly how would I know if it did? Given the external airlock technology, it seemed completely within reason that sections of the Koregoi ship itself might just be capable of peeling off and flying away on their own.

  That left . . . steal the stolen Koregoi ship back from Farweather, in a massively hubristic act of reverse piracy. With no tools, no weapons, no pirating skills, and no support from a shipmind or crew. Set a trap? Set a series of traps? Knock her on the back of the head?

  Hell of a way to run a mutiny.

  On the other hand, I was an engineer.

  Well, Haimey Dz, you always wanted to make a legend for yourself. Here’s your chance at becoming a really spectacular example of a cautionary tale!

  That was a lie. Well, not the second half. But I never had wanted to be famous. Or infamous, which I honestly seemed to have more of a talent for. I hadn’t wanted it: not after Niyara, and not now.

  Infamy would keep finding me, however.

  Some people just aren’t born to be anonymous, Singer said.

  Even if they’re born as one of faceless dozens, safe and secure, into a clade?

  Then: Wait, what?

  Singer?

  Singer, are you real?

  No answer, no tickle in my senso. Had he even bee
n there? Even been real?

  I’d heard rumors of senso-echoes, burn-in, pathways that got deep-chained in fox and synapses both. If I heard Singer where there was no Singer, that was my brain expecting what it had become accustomed to. Just as if I put a bit of cake in my mouth and expected sweetness, whether the morsel had sugar in it or not.

  I’d been alone, living as a fugitive in the belly of an alien ship and eating oxygen tank scrapings, for almost a decian now. Who the hell knew what my unsupervised brain was doing in there without Singer keeping tabs on it for me? Losing touch with reality, in all probability. Reverting to old, bad habits deeply ingrained in my neural pathways by a childhood that did not encourage the development of critical thinking skills.

  Great. Now I was hallucinating dead friends.

  And I still didn’t have a firm plan.

  Except for traps.

  Okay, so how did I lay traps for an enemy who was holed up in a tiny, fortified section of the ship, and who had already laid more than her share of traps to keep me out if I should venture there? And how did I manage to catch her without harming her? Maybe I was too well socialized, but I did, in fact, still stick at murder.

  Besides, she was the one who seemed to know how to control the ship. Unless she was just along for the ride as well, though that seemed unlikely.

  I could try to lure her out—either with bait, or by destroying something she wouldn’t want to see sacrificed. But if she wasn’t willing to come out even to try to contain or neutralize me—I flattered myself that I was probably her most immediate threat—then she was unlikely to leave her bolt-hole at all. Maybe, having locked me out of the areas she needed to control the Prize, she considered me already adequately neutralized.

  My own presumed inutility and ineffectuality were a cheerful perspective, so I thought about something else.

  I’d been floating in the safe harbor of one of the service tubes and thought a change of scene might help me think. I weaseled out of it, groped my afthands into my hated boots (I had acclimated, honestly, and was getting better at walking for longer periods without excruciating pain, even under gravity that was slightly heavier than Earth-normal), and went for a walk.

  The best thing about giant alien starships full of endlessly twisting corridors was that you could go for really long walks. Like, station walks. Hours and hours. I was even getting to the point where the constantly perspective-shifting, Escheresque corridors no longer made me nauseated.

  I was on my second lap around what I thought of as the Promenade, a spiraling Möbius strip of a loop that took me through that same observation bubble I’d first watched Singer destroyed from. Every time I passed through it, I stopped to observe my little ritual of memory. If you are a planetsider, you probably visit a grave or memorial to pay respects to a loved one. I just stopped for a moment each time I passed through this space, tilted my head back, and gazed up at the twisting bands of white space.

  In abstract emotional response rather than out of any physical problem, I ached. My palms hurt. My eyes hurt.

  Dammit, I missed my cats.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  I stood there for a few minutes, aching too much to get myself moving again, becoming increasingly uncomfortable as my body noticed a lack of inputs. This had been an increasing problem as I practiced meditating my way into the Koregoi ship’s outputs. I was getting better at it, and I was realizing that the control systems for the Koregoi vessel were set up to interface seamlessly and perhaps even on a subconscious level (assuming that Koregoi had anything like human levels of conscious awareness, which was dangerous turf to be on) with the desires of its crew. Which implied that the ship had or at one time had had something like a shipmind, even if I couldn’t figure out how to access or communicate with it. It must have some kind of discriminatory process, at least—so that the interlocking desires of a few thousand crew members wouldn’t cause the thing to tear itself apart. It must have.

  Mustn’t it? An autonomous regulatory system, at the very least.

  Maybe it functioned like the Synarche ideally should: a series of expert algorithms generating a consensus model based on weighted averages.

  But lately, my attempts at Zen starship maintenance had been mired in constant physical and senso-based distractions. As if somebody somewhere were playing a badly tuned radio in a space where I was attempting to concentrate.

  And now, here it was when I was standing up, just looking at the folded light of distant stars. My sensorium itched, metaphorically speaking. It was as if I were feeling a crackle of static, some kind of senso synesthesia. As if being so profoundly disconnected from all outside inputs that didn’t come from my own senses and the Koregoi parasite was causing my brain to fill up the empty spaces.

  Have you ever looked at real darkness? Darkness with absolutely no light in it? After a little while, your eyes begin to invent things. Sparkles. Outlines. Little shimmers and glimpses of movement. None of it is real, of course. It’s just bored neurons making work for themselves.

  I suspected that that was what I was feeling, or the machine-meat interface equivalent.

  Phantom pain.

  Sigh.

  My feet were starting to ache, and without thinking about it, I lightened the gravity to something that felt much more comfortable to my space-adapted body. I had been spending enough time in the weightless access tubes that my bones weren’t in danger of decaying under the constant pressure of my own weight, but I was frankly just sick and tired of being heavy.

  I stretched in relief, feeling my spine crack. Then, a moment later, I realized what I’d done, reflexively, without thinking about it or really trying. Or what the ship had done, in response to my unexpressed need.

  I’d just effortlessly controlled an aspect of the ship. Without so much as thinking about it. As if it were my own body. Or an autonomic process thereof. It had just kind of . . . done it for me.

  Which would be great, I thought, if I could get it to do the same sorts of things when I asked.

  No, Haimey. We don’t fantasize about spacing the pirate. Murder is still wrong. No matter how much somebody who murders pets and friends deserves to die.

  I didn’t have control over my heart rate, not really. I mean, I could slow it with meditation and raise it with exercise. But I had a fox, and using that I could control my heart rate, and blood pressure, and adrenaline levels, and all sorts of things.

  And if I could control the Prize’s pinpoint application of gravity, well. Gravity was a beautiful way to deal with Farweather, wasn’t it?

  Gravity would make a most satisfactory trap.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Oh bugger. One more thing to practice.

  On the other hand, one more thing to distract myself with. And I figured we were still at least two standard decians out from our destination, if I had it plotted right. Even at the speeds the Koregoi ship was moving at—not-moving at—even as quickly as the Koregoi ship was stitching space-time past itself, which was at a rate greater than I’d ever encountered or even heard was theoretically possible.

  I wondered if we were in danger of running out of fuel.

  Gravity. My enemy, my weapon.

  I wondered if I could get good enough at using it to crush Farweather against the deck like a grape smashed by acceleration.

  I knew I shouldn’t let myself hate her so much. I knew I shouldn’t. Hating people doesn’t accomplish anything except poisoning yourself. I should turn it off. I should let it go.

  The thing was, first I had to want to let it go.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  I kept waiting for Farweather to try to communicate with me. I kept waiting for her to reach out, to ask, to flirt. To get back to her gaslighting games, to get whatever she wanted from me.

  Maybe now that I was a de facto captive, admittedly one with the run of most of the less immediately useful segments of this vast ship, she figured that she didn’t need any cooperation. She and her cronies would force it out of me when we la
nded.

  Maybe she was hoping I would get desperate enough to come to her. To ask questions. To ask mercy? To ask for help.

  Well, I would come to her. Come for her.

  And I was planning on doing it just as soon as I’d had enough time to practice my control of the Prize’s artificial gravity. And how I was going to use it to quite literally pin her down and ask a few goddamned questions.

  And not hurt her any more than you have to, right, Haimey?

  I sighed. And not hurt her any more than I have to.

  Yes.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Next tiny goal—was this number five? Five and a half? Something like that—develop superpowers, and learn to control the force of gravity. Artificial gravity, at least, as practiced by the Koregoi.

  Odd thing was, it turned out I had a knack for it. It was fun; it was intuitive. Before long, I had fine-enough control that I could arrange the strength of the Prize’s artificial gravity in centimeter-wide bands, which I have to tell you felt really weird to step through.

  That reminded me of what I’d sensed in the dark gravity, the subtle gradations of density that made up a kind of pattern, like an old-fashioned bar code or stick-letter alphabet. I was becoming more and more convinced that what I had discovered was a code. Possibly I was becoming more and more deranged in my isolation, making up the kind of conspiracy theory narratives that human brains under stress are prone to. I checked my chemical balance, and it seemed fine, but.

  The limited processing capacity of my fox was inadequate to work on a problem like that. I needed the help of a shipmind.

  A pang: a shipmind was the thing I had not got.

  I went back to my current problem, then. Little goals: learning to use the Prize itself as a weapon.

  CHAPTER 18

  WELP. THERE’S DHARMA FOR YOU.

  Two sleeps (I couldn’t really call them diar, because my schedule was nothing like twenty-four stanhours anymore) before I planned to debut my daring (and dare I say, brilliant) plan to sneak into Farweather’s strongholds through the service access, use my newfound gravity powers to pin her to the decking, and tie her up and make her hand over control of the Prize, that old saw about contact with the enemy came into play.