Ancestral Night

by Elizabeth Bear

  I was damaged. I always would be. How much of that oversight held me together? Would I even be functional without it?

  “I dare you,” she said.

  “Drink your coffee,” I replied.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  “Why do you do what you do?” she asked me.

  “It gives me a lot of freedom,” I said. “I don’t like feeling trapped.”

  “The Freeports would give you more freedom.”

  “Sure,” I said. “As long as I subscribed to their . . . sorry, your . . . ideology. It’s the freedom to do whatever I want, as long as I’m willing to agree that other people’s well-being doesn’t matter unless they can enforce it.”

  She looked at me blankly.

  “Who cleans up the messes selfish people make? Somebody has to. With children, it’s parents. When it’s an adult with social power, what then?”

  Farweather ducked her head so she could scratch her nose. “Well, cleaning it up is not my problem. I mean, I don’t have to worry about that.”

  “I don’t want to live in that world.”

  Farweather seemed to be thinking. “You’d rather let other people put their well-being over yours?”

  “When they need it more? Sure would.”

  “Huh.” Shaking her head gently, frowning, neck slightly twisted, she hunched her shoulders. She drew away. Probably would have walked away, if she hadn’t been chained to a stanchion.

  Brave words, Dz. And yet, if I admitted it, her sophipathology—no, I needed the older word, the archaic word—her sociopathy, her social sickness . . . It was attractive. Not being beholden to anybody. Not being responsible for anybody but myself. Not caring what effect my actions had on others.

  I thought of Connla when he had that dialed up. His confidence. Unapologetic skill. Ability to get through the most stressful situations without self-criticism, self-consciousness, or choking.

  What would it be like not to be worried all the time about what effect my actions had on other people?

  Maybe Farweather was right.

  Maybe that was freedom.

  I wondered what would happen if I just . . . turned my ethics off again.

  The freedom had felt good. It had been nice to worry only about myself and the pragmatic results of whether what I was doing right now would get me what I wanted, right now or in the immediate future. I’d needed Farweather for my own purposes, so I could be confident that I probably wouldn’t kill her.

  Could I rely on that need to keep me from killing her? It would be a lot easier to get through this if I weren’t so damned worried and conflicted all the time. Thinking about the future was really doing a number on me.

  Of course it’s not that simple, but a rightminded person has pretty good control over things like their level of social engagement. Connla used that trick to get his self-conscious brain out of the way when he needed to fly hard and without thinking too much about the consequences of failure.

  It can be dangerous to just turn off your conscience, of course. Especially without a cutout, a good friend, or an AI to make sure you remember to turn it back on again afterward. Consciences are the sort of thing that don’t seem really desirable to have, unless you’re currently using yours. And I really didn’t want to have to keep dealing with the pangs and irruptions of mine now.

  But . . . No, I couldn’t. I mean, it would make talking to her—trying to manipulate her—a lot easier to put up with. But I might also decide that reassembling her airgun was a productive use of my time, and that’s not the sort of equipment that goes well with poor impulse control.

  Besides, I probably needed my empathy in order to create some kind of emotional bond with her and get her on my side.

  Or at least that was a reasonable-sounding excuse, and I could keep telling myself that.

  Well and falling, I did not want to keep talking to her. But I didn’t want to be totally alone with only the sound of my own voice in my head to argue with, either.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  “It seems to me,” Farweather said, “that you find a lot of your validation in service.”

  “I’m not going to like you,” I told her. “Your friends killed my friends. There’s no payback for a debt as big as the one you owe me.”

  She was studying me curiously, a furrow between her black brows. The shimmer of blue iridescence on her hair was long vanished, dulled by grease and dirt. I’d taken sponge baths when I could, but we were both filthy.

  “So what debt are you trying to pay back with all this doing things for other people, babes? What sin do you think you owe an unpaybackable debt for?”

  “Sin is a null concept,” I said.

  “So why all this fuss about service, then?”

  The chilled clench in my stomach didn’t ease when I drank hot miso broth. I didn’t look at her. “It’s as good a reason to live as any.”

  “Okay,” she said. “What about what you want?”

  I shrugged. “What about what I want?”

  “You serve other people’s needs. Who serves yours?”

  “What if what I need is to feel valuable to a community? To feel like I’m contributing and supporting my fellows.”

  “That’s certainly what you’ve been brainwashed into feeling. Your entire life.”

  “Maybe it’s who I am.”

  “Maybe it’s why Niyara picked you out.”

  I admit it. I gawked.

  She smirked at me, smug. She’d gotten my attention (and eye contact) now.

  “That’s a sealed juvenile file,” I said.

  She shrugged. Her chains rattled. Man, if I turned off my ethics I’d probably murder her just to not have to hear the rattling for a while. “Even in the heart of the empire, corruption spreads.”

  “Well,” I swore. I wanted to spit, so I drank soup instead.

  “You don’t want to believe that.” She had a cup of soup, too, but she wasn’t drinking hers. She was just holding it between her hands, which rested on her upraised knees. I had dragged in some fluffy stuff that might be a mattress and might be packing material of the sort with little stale bubbles of atmosphere sandwiched between impermeable layers, and made her something reasonably soft to sit and sleep on.

  I had my own pile against the wall a ways away, though when I had to sleep I usually did it floating in the access tubes. I have never slept well under gravity. Or within earshot of Farweather.

  “I don’t believe it,” I allowed.

  “Because you’re an idiot who will sacrifice herself for any cause, no matter how stupid it is, if somebody she likes tells her it’s important. Because it’s been etched into you to do so.”

  I shrugged. Maybe she was right.

  Maybe she was winning the argument—a prospect that both scared and excited me.

  We sat in silence for a few minutes. I got up, brewed algae broth, fetched each of us a mug with a wide bottom and a narrow top. So strange, drinking out of open containers like we were in some kind of antique drama or something. I’d found them in a room with nonfunctional taps. Maybe they were drinking vessels. Maybe they were urinals.

  I sat down again and we faced each other, drinking silently and in unison, cradling the mugs between our hands and letting the steam bathe our faces between each sip.

  I realized I was mirroring her, and intentionally broke the pattern by setting my mug down.

  You can just set things down. And they stay where you put them. I’ll never get used to that.

  “Don’t you wonder who you’d be without the clade? Without Judicial Recon? Without rightminding?”

  For some reason, this time it sank in that she knew about the Recon, too. So much for my privacy.

  She must have read my face, because she shrugged and said, “You were interesting.”

  I thought it was a lie. I thought she’d known something about me before we ever met. I thought that was why Connla and Singer and I had been fed the information that led us to the Milk Chocolate Marauder in the first p
lace, and why they’d been waiting for us there.

  They’d been a little early, was all. Had to leave and come back. Been lucky they hadn’t startled us off when they nearly ran us over.

  I’d thought about it and thought about it, and nothing else made sense. Coincidence was possible. But what was much more likely was enemy action.

  I finished my broth in one gulp. It had cooled enough that it nearly didn’t scorch my throat going down.

  I said, “Without that stuff? I wouldn’t be anybody.”

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Maybe Farweather was better at using the Koregoi senso than I was because she was so much less self-conscious. Self-conscious? Self-aware.

  She was what she was. She did what she did. I didn’t think she worried about the whys and wherefores too much, come to think of it. If the universe had been bent on handing me an example of the exact opposite of who I was, it couldn’t have found a better one. We might have been two opposite halves of one thing, complementary and conflicted.

  I wondered if her personal life was a trail of carnage, too.

  Probably, I thought. Probably.

  She seemed not to feel nearly as bad about it as I would have, however.

  It had felt glorious, not caring about consequences beyond what I wanted right now and was pretty sure I could get. Farweather just wanted what she wanted. She did what she felt like doing. She didn’t care who got hurt, and she didn’t feel any social responsibility to mitigate that harm, or seek compromise, or balance her needs against the needs of others.

  I realized that on some level, I envied her.

  Outside, the folded sky of white space—and my time as a free person (was I a free person?)—whisked silently by.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  And then there was the part of my brain that remembered my history lessons and the ancient books I liked so much because they were a window into a world far more alien than the one embodied by people like Cheeirilaq and Singer. That part of me also reminded me periodically of what the outcomes were when an entire society was controlled by predators like Farweather.

  That was how we got here in the first place. Got to the Synarche, I mean, not got to bunking on bubble wrap in a stolen alien space ship a million light-ans from anything useful. People like Farweather, unconstrained, create conditions so awful that people eventually decided to change themselves rather than keep living that way.

  The voice in my own head was sounding more and more like Singer with every passing dia. I wondered if my personality was bifurcating. I’d read somewhere that that wasn’t a real thing, but it sure showed up enough in old novels.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  “It’s your hypocrisy that bothers me,” Farweather said.

  I blinked at her. “I don’t understand what you mean.”

  “Well, you’ll give me a lot of pious nonsense about how rightminding is essential for overcoming our atavistic urges and living in a civilized society, and yet you are afraid of using it yourself.”

  “I don’t consider it cheating,” I said. “I use it all the time.”

  She stared at me. I refused to look down. We broke at the same instant, or gave up, or decided it wasn’t worth continuing. I heard myself sigh in relief, though, and caught the tiny smirk at the corners of her mouth before she controlled it.

  “No, you don’t, babes. You let other people use it on you. Other . . . things. Artificials. Objects.”

  “Singer is a people,” I snapped. And then felt terrible, because Singer had been a people, and now he was gone. And this . . . creature had helped kill him.

  If anybody was an object around here . . .

  “Keep his name out of your mouth,” I said, and then felt even stupider, because she hadn’t even said his name.

  I was losing this round, and I needed to disengage without seeming like I was running away.

  “Then why?” she asked, her voice low and intimate.

  I didn’t answer. Because I don’t trust myself to make those decisions was not the sort of vulnerability you revealed to an enemy. And I am, and always have been, a terrible liar. Another side effect of growing up in a clade: you don’t get a lot of practice, because everybody around you generally knows what you’re thinking most of the time anyway.

  “So you don’t think you’re a hypocrite?” she asked.

  “No,” I answered. “No more so than most people.”

  She snorted, her child, you are so tiresome sound. “This from somebody who doesn’t like rightminding for herself, just for everybody around her—”

  “That’s not what I said—”

  “—and who’s decided to have her damned sexuality turned off rather than go through the rehab and therapy to deal with her trauma.”

  I stared at her for a minute. She stared back levelly.

  “How did you know I had that turned off?”

  She shrugged. “You told somebody on Downthehatch, didn’t you?”

  I stared right at her and said, “The reason I turned it off is because I have lousy taste in women.”

  She smiled, and I couldn’t tell if she was failing to take my meaning, or failing to take my meaning on purpose, or just didn’t consider it the insult I had intended it to be. Actually, she looked like she was taking it as a compliment, and I wished I’d kept my mouth shut.

  “You could get that fixed too,” she said, smiling smugly.

  “A lot of work,” I answered, smiling smugly right back at her, “for so very little reward.”

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  “You know,” Farweather said, “it wasn’t us that killed your friends.”

  She was giving herself a sponge bath, crouched down with a bowl of water between her knees and a folded-up wad of fiber. I stood guard, turned slightly away to offer her a scrap of privacy. I’d rearranged her chains so she had a little more freedom, and I was watching her carefully for the time being to make sure it hadn’t been too much freedom. She made a pretense of docility, but I had my fox tuned to keep reminding me that she wasn’t tame and I needed to be on my guard around her. It would be much too easy to relax.

  On the other hand, I was as much her captive as she was mine. I might have her body under control—but she, in her own way, had mine. I was going where she wanted to go, where her friends were waiting for us. And okay, it might be a little embarrassing for her to explain how she wound up handcuffed to a stanchion, but she could probably spin that as part of her master plan to subvert me.

  I kept working on the ship, working on my connection to the ship. I was learning interesting and useful things, refining my control over its internal spaces, and I was utterly failing to get any control over its trajectory or speed. I wasn’t going to quit trying. But to be honest I wasn’t feeling very hopeful.

  Farweather hadn’t looked up, studiedly casual, as if she didn’t care if I rose to her bait.

  It was probably worth it. “Oh, didn’t you?”

  She pulled her suit up, fastened it, and tapped the bulkhead with one finger. The nail was getting pretty long and clicked quite satisfyingly. I wasn’t about to give her anything sharp enough to cut them with. “You must have gotten close enough to trigger this thing’s self-defense mechanisms.”

  I sat down against the far wall.

  She pushed the bowl of water and the washcloth out of her immediate orbit. I’d clean them up later.

  “That seems likely,” I said. I was trying for neutral, but the dryness must have soaked through.

  She fastened her collar tab and gave me a lopsided smile.

  “You want me to believe the Koregoi ship just attacked Singer. When I know your ship has guns, and you fired on us previously. When you came out of white space just then in a hail of particles.”

  “We knew it had defenses,” she said. “That’s why we planned the high-speed flyby, dropping out of white space just long enough for me to bail out, correct trajectory, and spacewalk over to the vessel. We didn’t shoot you, so it must have used those defenses on your shipm
ates.”

  “And your high speed had nothing to do with the fact that there were a dozen Core vessels lined up for a piece of the Prize.”

  She smiled. “Most of them don’t have guns.”

  A few had, though. But the pirates had been and gone before any of them could have acquired a solution. Which made it seem like maybe Farweather might be telling the truth about not being behind the death of Singer and his crew. The pirate vessel would not have had a lot of time to acquire a solution either. Especially if it had been busy coming up with a launch trajectory for Farweather.

  But the bow wave . . .

  Hell, maybe it was an accident. On the other hand, Farweather seemed capable of lying about absolutely everything.

  I said, “I haven’t seen any evidence of guns on this ship, either.”

  “You used the artificial gravity to nail me to the deck,” she said. “What’s to say that the ship can’t use the same technology as a weapon?”

  I pretended I hadn’t already thought of that myself.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “You tell me. Your people obviously know more about it than mine do.”

  She sat down too, facing me. I got up and moved her washbasin away, dumped it, wiped it clean. Started water for coffee.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.

  “Really? You didn’t get onto a ship controlled by a famously xenophobic race like the Jothari by trading them artificial gravity for access to their vessel? By installing it for them, and also installing the overrides?”

  Her head had fallen to the side. Her hair was getting long, too. She smiled at me and didn’t say anything.

  “So where’d you get that technology?”

  “Who’s to say we did?”

  “Less intact Koregoi ships?” I asked. “Dead ones?”

  She leaned back and closed her eyes.

  I said, “That just leaves the question of why you needed to get on the Jothari ship. It can’t just have been a matter of wanting to steal a ship with the artificial gravity tech, not when you must have sold it to them and gone along to help install it and play technician.”

  “That’s an interesting theory.”