Ancestral Night

by Elizabeth Bear

  As if thinking of her had summoned her, she poked me in the attention. Are you on task, babes?

  Looking for my meat memories didn’t seem to be getting me anywhere. They were doubtless under so many layers of confabulation that I’d never be able to pick them out clearly anyway. Maybe I was just going to have to shut down my fox for a while and see what happened.

  That meant getting to my own operating system, so to speak. And using Farweather’s codes.

  I could feel her looking over my shoulder, virtually speaking, as I delved deeper in my mind. The temptation to pull up old ayatanas and wallow in the memories was as powerful as any time you’re going through your music collection and hit that cache of files you haven’t listened to since you were in school. But I managed, despite the pull of nostalgia and procrastination.

  Having Farweather right there playing virtual voyeur helped to keep the urge suppressed.

  Anyway, I was getting closer to the operating system. I poked around a bit more, and was pretty sure I had found it because I suddenly hit such a strong sense of aversion that if Farweather hadn’t been backstopping me, I would have been halfway across the room and totally jacked out of our jury-rigged sharing system before anybody could have said “boo.” As I reached for the contact pads at the base of my skull, though, she gave me such a boost of calm that I managed to stop my hands in mid-grab and return them slowly to my lap.

  “Why do I think there’s more going on here than you’re telling me?” I said out loud.

  She shrugged. “Quit now, and you’ll never get the chance to find out.”

  I wanted to curse her, but if I randomly cursed out everybody who got on my nerves on a given dia, I never would have been able to exist on a tiny ship with Connla for a decans and a half. Instead, I reached out into the structure of the hull with the Koregoi senso. Make backups, Singer always said. I fiddled with a few things, and left it there.

  Best I could do right now.

  She said, “What if I told you I had Niyara.”

  I stared at her, scoffed. “Niyara is dead. She died while bleeding all over me.”

  After cheating all over me, I thought. She’d lied on so many fronts, in so many ways. About big things and little. I could have dealt with being a secondary relationship, if she hadn’t lied to me about not having a primary one. I . . . well, I probably wouldn’t have been okay with her being a terrorist.

  Would I have been?

  Farweather turned her head so I could see the corner of her smile. “I’ve got her ayatana. Up to the moment of her death, actually. Safely hidden, so don’t bother ratting through my stuff to find it.”

  I probably would have made a derogative comment about the desirability of ratting through pirate bags. Except I’d been doing it for weeks, scavenging her food and equipment.

  So I guess she had me there.

  On the one hand, if there was any such recording, it would explain a lot about how Farweather knew so much about me. And how she knew about the book. On the other hand, if there wasn’t such a recording, her claim that she’d hidden it outside of her luggage meant I could never actually be sure if it existed or not.

  I really had to stop underestimating her. It was going to get my head staved in. And maybe I should look into hiding some information where she wouldn’t find it, just in case the Synarche got their hands and tentacles and whatnot on the Prize and I . . . hadn’t made it.

  “Then you probably know where she got the information you’re so desperate to get back from me,” I challenged.

  “Oh, sure,” Farweather said. “She stole it.”

  “It’d help if you told me what it was. I might be able to find it.”

  “But you wouldn’t tell me what it is if you did know.” She still had her back to me, but she crossed her arms triumphantly.

  “I might bargain,” I said. “After all, you have a lot of things that I want.”

  She glanced over her shoulder to leer at me, and I rolled my eyes.

  “Don’t be boring,” I said.

  “Look who’s talking.” But she turned away again. “A Koregoi artifact. She lifted it, and your clademothers managed to decipher the markings.”

  “My clademothers?” It burst out of me like I was an unregulated child.

  Farweather was lying. She had to be lying.

  She didn’t feel like she was lying.

  I took a long, calming breath.

  She continued, “It was a probe, probably. Small. White space capable. There were plates on it made of inert metal. Inscribed with symbols. Didn’t Terrans used to send out probes like that?”

  “This wasn’t Terran, though, I take it?”

  “Definitely old,” she answered. “It was spotted near the Core, and declared a heritage site, but the seekers and scientists hadn’t managed to decode it. Niyara and some other Freeporters managed to . . . liberate it. It turned out it was a marker—a buoy, basically—and what it was there to mark was this thing.” She tapped the deck under her hand. “That’s how we knew where to look for it.”

  “You expect me to believe that my clademothers managed to read the message on an ancient artifact that the Core universities couldn’t decipher? And that they were working with pirates? I do not believe it.”

  She shrugged. “They were pathological, but pretty good archaeologists, or so I hear. Possibly it’s something to do with being so atavistic their own selves.”

  “Ooo, big word,” I said mockingly.

  She took it in stride, with a grin and a little shake of her head.

  “So if your people found this, and my people decoded it and shared the information with you, why are you so keen on what you think I know?”

  Farweather made a grumpy noise, like a disturbed cat. “Because Niyara didn’t share everything with anybody, apparently. She spread her information around. And hid some of it.”

  “Why would she do that if she was planning to die?”

  Farweather answered me with a question. “Haven’t you always wondered what she was thinking?”

  I didn’t answer. She cranked around to check my face, then batted her lashes at me while I resolutely did not move sideways to make eye contact. “Haven’t you ever wondered how she felt about you? If maybe she wanted to give you something of value, that you could bargain with? She’d have to hide something like that even from you, though—because she had to know there would be Recon, and she couldn’t have you handing it over to Judiciary, or to your clade.”

  “You know what?” I said. “I really don’t want to know. In fact, I was an ass to let you talk me into this.”

  I hadn’t managed to pick my way through her defenses and her unfamiliar tech to find out more about how she was piloting the Prize, if in fact she was piloting the Prize. I hadn’t figured out how much she actually knew about me, about Niyara, about what Niyara had given me or done. And suddenly, I didn’t care anymore at all.

  All I had accomplished was giving her another avenue to get under my skin. My skin, which was marked with the stigmata of a murdered Ativahika.

  I stripped the rig off and stood. This was a great time to make coffee. Farweather said a few more things at me, but she was talking to my shoulder. I had plenty to occupy my attention and my hands.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Rightminding is a wonderful technology.

  I didn’t even think once about busting her nose.

  Well, not that dia, anyway.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  “The lights are dimming again,” Farweather said, after I gave her her coffee in silence and backed away to sip my own at a safe distance.

  It had happened once or twice since the first time. We’d both largely been ignoring it, each of us pretending for the other that we had some idea of what was going on, I surmised—unless she was behind it all, but if she was, or if she wasn’t, I certainly wasn’t going to give away that I was completely flummoxed by asking her.

  I wondered what new gambit this was. What strategy had changed he
r mind.

  “Well,” I said, “my little box here isn’t drawing any power from any external system. What do you think might be causing it?”

  She glanced over her shoulder at me, and I—having turned toward her a little as well—could just see the edge of her frown. We were like two cats spatting, each refusing to yield turf or acknowledge the existence of the other.

  “I just don’t know,” she said.

  Well, that was a terrible answer.

  I finished the coffee. I turned around and came toward her, looked at her. She rose, and came to look at me. She studied my face; I felt the beginnings of a connection. Some comprehension. A bridge between us.

  She said, “Maybe we could, after all, find common ground. Work together. Maybe we can team up.”

  I said, “I need to go home, Farweather.”

  She smirked bitterly. “So do I.”

  “That didn’t sound like a decision, exactly.”

  “No,” she said. “Nor loyalty.”

  I wondered if she really was a human bomb. Like Niyara.

  Niyara had chosen it, though.

  I waited. We stood, facing each other. I knew I was too close; but I wanted to be there.

  This is a bad idea, said the little voice in my head. My own internalized ghost of Singer. Haimey, step back.

  She moved so fast I didn’t even see her, swinging with one straight arm, taking a single lunge step forward, and clapping her cupped left hand against my right temple with force and accuracy.

  I fell to the floor. I felt the impact on my limbs and body, treacherous gravity. Treacherous gravity.

  Treacherous gravity. My ally in this fight!

  She’d—what had she done?

  I tried to reach out into the parasite, to slam Farweather back against the wall, but all I got was a tickle of presence and then a crushing, incapacitating pain. Not from the fall; from my chest and my belly. From my heart.

  I’m having a heart attack. She’s somehow triggered a heart attack. I am going to die right here.

  CHAPTER 21

  IT HURT SO MUCH, I wished I would die. I was felled, like a tree. Like an ox. Like all those primitive, atavistic things that humans used to fell with their primitive, atavistic tools. The hard way. An axe through the heartwood; a hammer at the center of an X drawn between the ears and eyes.

  Swing hard; follow through to the other side of whatever you are swinging at.

  Zanya Farweather had been swinging at my soul.

  My identity, my selfhood. The person I’d been for nearly twenty ans. It dropped away, and I was left wrecked and retching, cramped, choking up a thin stream of bile.

  She hadn’t really done anything to me physically. This was just what a broken heart felt like.

  I’m an engineer. The little bit of my brain that stayed clear and focused in a crisis asserted itself, contemplated the problem. My fox wasn’t working.

  I curled in on myself. The pain was physical, immobilizing. As if I had been electrocuted.

  Which is another way they used to fell animals, and people.

  I couldn’t . . . think. My mind skittered, blurred. I decided I needed to stand up; started to. Some indeterminate time later I realized I was still lying there. It seemed fine.

  Somebody was touching me. Farweather. I wanted to recoil, but instead my body twitched feebly and lay still. She had pillowed my head on something uncomfortable, bony and soft. Her thigh. She petted my hair.

  “Rest,” she said. “I’ve got you.”

  I tried to organize myself, my thoughts. Tune the pain and grief and confusion down. Reflexively, I reached for that solace.

  It wasn’t there. Concentration failed me. I wasn’t . . . unconscious, exactly. But I also wasn’t aware. The world swam fuzzily, as if on the other side of a high fever, a concussion, a heavy drunk or other mild poisoning. My limbs didn’t respond when I told them to, or when they did, they didn’t behave in the ways I desired. Like a small child who couldn’t quite get the stylus to move properly on the pad to make the smooth line she envisions.

  Eventually, I slept.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  I awoke several times into half-awareness and hungover discomfort before the final time, when I swam up into something like real consciousness. My body ached; I huddled in nausea. My skin felt chafed where the edges of my suit touched.

  Farweather was right beside me. She seemed to be sleeping, sitting upright against the wall. She’d dragged me onto her improvised mattress. When I moved, the materials rustled, and she stirred.

  “Drink this,” she said, when my eyes opened. She handed me a squeeze bulb of something green—an electrolyte drink from her stores.

  The chain I’d put on her rattled as she did it; she didn’t seem to have gotten free.

  I took the bulb, tried to sit up, and rapidly thought better of it. I lay back down and tried to remember exactly what had happened.

  “How long?” I asked.

  “About twelve hours,” she said. “The vascular effects should be wearing off by now. You might have some memory and attention deficits for a while. Drink.”

  There was a bulb in my hand. I wasn’t sure where it had come from, though it looked like the ones in her stores. I put it to my lips and bit down on the valve.

  Sweet, tangy. It hit bottom in my stomach, first nauseating and then, suddenly, soothing. I felt better.

  She’d . . . not a virus. Not a physical concussion. An EM pulse? That must be it. She’d somehow, with her parasite or with an implant of some kind, generated a powerful magnetic field, and she’d blasted it through my head.

  There was a bulb in my hand, and I realized I was thirsty. It was about two-thirds full of greenish electrolyte drink. I put it in my mouth and drank.

  I couldn’t remember exactly what had happened. She’d put her hand to my face, like a caress. And then the pain.

  I’d fallen down.

  There were things . . . I reached for my fox, to try to tune some of the pain and nausea out. Nothing; not even the crackle of static. I remembered blood on my hands. I remembered the pain of loss. I remembered what it felt like to have your heart peeled out of your body and handed to you by somebody you’d loved and allowed yourself to be vulnerable to.

  I didn’t want to remember those things, but for some reason I didn’t seem to be able to stop remembering.

  I remembered that you couldn’t trust anyone.

  There was a bulb in my hand. “Drink,” Farweather said, and I finished the little bit of fluid left in the bottom.

  “Good girl,” she said, and took it away from me.

  My stomach churned. My head rang, vision doubling. I closed my eyes. I felt nauseated for some reason. Had I been drinking?

  I tried to bump, to bring the pain down. For some reason, my fox didn’t seem to be responding.

  I slept.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  “You have to wake up,” Farweather said softly. “Both of us are going to need calories before long, and I can’t reach the rest of the supplies.”

  I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to open my eyes. My head was splitting, and all I wanted to do was lie down and hide. For some reason, though I kept trying to bump to kill the headache, it kept not improving.

  “Dammit,” she said. “They told me neuronal death was going to be minimal.”

  I cracked an eye. “What did you do to me?”

  “EMP,” she said. “Don’t worry; I just wiped your fox. The OS is toast, and the memory, but there shouldn’t be a lot of organic damage.”

  “You wiped my memory?”

  “Machine memory,” she said. “You have backups, I’m sure.”

  Not of most of what I’d seen and learned since Singer was killed. Since this woman helped kill Singer. In that time, I had just a few things that I’d squirreled away.

  I closed my eyes again, then opened them, because I didn’t have the energy to sit up and punch her in the nose.

  She said, “You’ll be fine, but
you need some more hydration and calories.”

  “Easy for you to say,” I said.

  I slept again.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  I dreamed, and they were the terrible dreams that I had been tuning out for twenty ans.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  The bottle is heavy. An antique. An art object, some kind of collectible. Possibly even gray-market valuable. I haven’t asked where it came from, but I wonder how it made its way to space. What its history is.

  None of that really matters now.

  Now it is becoming a weapon in my hands.

  I fill it meticulously, careful of the funnel. The glass is good because it’s unlikely to strike a spark. It takes a screw-top, and I’ve constructed a reinforced one. I wipe the threads very carefully before I screw it on.

  I set the bottle aside as she appears in the doorway. “Done?”

  I look at the row a little sadly. Four, two for her and two for me. Tomorrow, I won’t have to worry about not being real anymore.

  Tomorrow I’ll have served a purpose that isn’t the one that was planned out for me since birth. Tomorrow, I’ll die with my love.

  “Done,” I say.

  She comes over and carefully touches a wall brace to discharge any sparks before she ruffles my hair. “Go home and clean up,” she suggests. “We ought to celebrate. I’ll pick you up in an hour?”

  “Celebrate.” The word feels weird as I roll it around my tongue. “But these—”

  “Aren’t going anywhere. I’ll lock them in.” She scritches my scalp luxuriously with her nails.

  I stretch and purr.

  She laughs and says, “If it makes you feel better, we can go to the same place as tomorrow. There. Now it’s reconnaissance, and you can’t say no.”

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  I didn’t jerk awake, because I woke so suddenly I was still paralyzed from the dream. The paralysis felt like a memory, too. Like running through glue when I heard the explosion. Knowing exactly what had happened. Knowing that Niyara had tricked me.

  That I was going to have to live with what we’d done.

  How would Niyara, of all people, ever have constructed a bomb? No, she needed me for that.

  She needed an engineer.