Ancestral Night

by Elizabeth Bear

  Connla didn’t twitch at all. He just kept staring out the observation port he stood framed against, tall and broad-shouldered and muscular, for a spacer, in his dusty blacks. Even if he wasn’t my type, I could see that the Spartacus gengineers were good.

  Farweather stepped through the open portal. She was wearing better clothes than when I’d seen her last: something piratical in deep purple with flowing sleeves and a black waistcoat of some heavy, dully glossy material, playing to type—or stereotype. She looked better-fed, too. I guess she hadn’t been reduced to raiding the algae tanks to stay alive.

  “Good dia, puppets of the hive mind,” she said pleasantly. “I understand you need to be rescued?”

  “Come in.” I stepped back, opening a space for her. I waved at the constables to put their sticks away. Grrrs’s antennae quivered, but it holstered its weapon, pretty ostentatiously. Nobody likes it when their partner gets hurt.

  The constables stepped back. Connla continued to stand where he was, feet apart, attention on the incoming storm of drones. They looked like flakes of mica, now. Like black, flashing octagonal mirrors; like solar panels slicing through the void. They looked like obsidian knives, reflecting their bloated red primary’s sullen gloom.

  Our hull still resonated with their song. If they were intended to intimidate, it worked.

  Farweather swaggered into the center of the circle. She had a weapon on her belt. Not the one I’d confiscated from her, but also a projectile weapon. I hoped she wasn’t noticing that I was wearing that one.

  That must have been quite a cache—

  Suddenly I knew where she’d hidden it. And herself.

  Singer.

  Busy.

  I was so excited I didn’t think about how weird it was that an intelligence with as much processing power as Singer wasn’t feeling up to multitasking. I said, Right. But for later. Her cache is on the hull. It’s outside the damned ship. She never brought it inside.

  I heard his exasperation. Oh, of course.

  It was stupid and reckless. Sitting out there with the radiation and the micrometeors and Void knew what. Stupid and reckless.

  Just the sort of thing Farweather would do.

  Damn, I was really bad at thinking like a sophipath.

  I stepped aside, ushering her toward the window. “You can see the problem.”

  “That’s impressive,” she agreed. “You must be Connla Kuruscz.” She put her hands on her hips as she came up beside him. “Nice flying.”

  He acknowledged her with a sidelong glance and a quirk of his mouth. I saw her react to the charm when he turned it on and surprised myself by feeling a little jealous, though I wasn’t sure of whom.

  That was when Cheeirilaq, who had been lurking quietly in the corner, dropped a loop of webbing around her torso.

  Or tried. Because I don’t know how she sensed it coming, but she did, and ducked and whirled. She had her weapon in her hand so fast I only saw a blur, and she had a bead on the Goodlaw and was pulling the trigger. I heard the huff of compressed air and felt the heaviness of the object leaving the barrel at the same moment—

  I’m not sure what I did. How I reacted.

  Everybody in the center of the deck hit it hard as I yanked the bullet down. I thought—I wanted—to slam it into the deck plates. Except the deck wasn’t plates and trajectories don’t work that way.

  My ears popped hard as the bullet smashed through the exterior hull beneath Cheeirilaq’s web, and the song of the Koregoi drones was joined by the horrible, high-pitched wail of escaping atmosphere through a tiny hole.

  “This again,” Connla said.

  I had my stolen gun out and aimed at Farweather. There was nothing behind her but observation windows and the void and a glittering swarm of alien drones. The wind ruffled her hair. It tugged at mine.

  She had just fired a projectile weapon inside a space vessel. I heard the shriek of decompression and did not think I could force myself to do the same. But I narrowed my eyes and tried to look like I would.

  “Freeze,” I said. “You’re under arrest, Zanya Farweather.”

  She grinned. “Oh, you can all burn in hell. No help from me.”

  Singer broke in. “Fortunately, your help is not required. I am in communication with the Koregoi construct now.”

  “Then it’s a good thing my reinforcements are here. Pity, this could have been the overture to a beautiful friendship.”

  I gaped out the observation port. She wasn’t kidding. The drones swirled and broke, and beyond their swarm I could see the shimmer of something winking in out of white space.

  Ships. Still far enough away that I could only make out their details because Singer had magnified the image.

  There were some dozen of them. Some bristling with weaponry and some variegated hulls decorated in all the shades of chocolate brown.

  Jothari vessels. Some so enormous they had to be factory ships. Others smaller, more nimble.

  Every one of them armed, if the objects run out of the uncovered portals in their hulls were weapons.

  God in a well.

  “Course correction!” Connla called to Singer. “Fifteen degrees insystem. And punch it; we need to get ahead of these guys.”

  I held my gun on Farweather. “Aren’t they mad at you?”

  She held her gun on me. “Why would they be? We liberated their ship from the Synarche, salvaged it, and returned it to them in good working order with the cargo intact.”

  Nausea burned my throat at the memory of that cargo. “You killed their whole crew!”

  She shrugged. “There’s no evidence of that on board the returned ship. No evidence of how the disaster happened at all, actually. Just a complete lack of any crew members, Jothari or human. Obviously, the crew must be in Synarche custody. If they’re even still alive.”

  There was a pause, during which my jaw worked and I didn’t say anything.

  She continued blithely, “The Jothari don’t even know that anybody survived the wreck. And since they’re pretty bad at telling Earth-humans apart, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t mention it to them, if you happen to run into any. Or get taken prisoner by them, say. And on that note—”

  That was when Zanya Farweather blew me a kiss.

  And dropped through the floor like a ghost.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  “How the hell did she learn to do that?” I asked the air, and realized that the shriek of decompression and the song of the aliens had both stopped. The silence rang.

  We ran before the pirate armada like a photosphere before the shock wave of an exploding star. I could feel them, now, when I hadn’t been able to, before. Or hadn’t been skilled enough to pick them out from the background noise.

  Singer said, “I’d guess she got the idea from watching you manipulate the bulkheads into restraints.”

  Of course she had. Of course she’d spent the whole time I had her chained up thinking about how to work that. I was just lucky she hadn’t figured it out soon enough to crush my skull in my sleep when we were alone here.

  “What the— Is this whole damned ship just nanites holding hands?”

  “Pretty much,” Singer said.

  Connla grunted. He walked over and kicked at the deck that Farweather had dropped through like a magician. It had healed without a scar. “I wish I could adequately express how insecure that makes me feel.”

  I said, “Singer, you’re talking to the Koregoi constructs right now? Really? Or were you using psychology on her?”

  “I am talking to the constructs right now and I was using psychology on her.”

  “You could have mentioned it.”

  “You were busy. Besides, I was saving it for a big reveal.”

  “Are they going to eat us?”

  “Haimey. Haimey. It’s talking to me. It’s huge and it’s old and it’s full of questions. It likes problems. It sings. Sometimes it sings solar flares out of its star’s corona because they are pretty and it likes to look at them.
”

  “Sings solar flares out of—”

  May I remind you that we’re also being pursued, Grrrs said, jerking its antennae at the window.

  At least we’re not decompressing anymore. Cheeirilaq waved a leg, demonstrating the hull patch it had made with webbing. Although perhaps it would be most structurally sound for Singer to seal that shut with his hull material?

  “Already happening,” Singer said.

  “Singer,” Connla said. “Pirates!”

  CHAPTER 27

  SAID PIRATES WERE STILL OUTSIDE the swarming shell of Koregoi mirrors, still far enough away that we had a little time to plan. But they didn’t look happy, and while we were getting as much a as we could, we weren’t exactly gaining.

  I guess what I’m insinuating is that we had a lot of concurrent problems to plan around. And I hate to say it, but our most immediate problem was that our AI was not paying attention.

  Our AI was in love.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Perhaps it would be better to term it hero worship, but whatever it was, he would not shut up about how wonderful the Koregoi construct was, and how much its design and structure delighted him.

  “You have to realize, what we’re dealing with here is a style of computational decision-making I’ve never encountered before. Its thought processes are an emergent property of its structure!”

  While he was telling me this, I was physically upside down in an access tube with my legs sticking out into gravity and my upper half floating free, and let me tell you if you’re a downsider you have no idea how weird the whole concept and sensation of upside down is to somebody who grew up without it.

  I was trying to find the correct ancient alien microcircuitry to pull or circumvent or correct in some manner in order to manually override whatever Farweather was doing or had done in order to hide herself from us. If she was hiding outside the ship, then I might be able to tune a few of our exterior sensors on the hull rather than away from it, and repurpose some of the Prize’s maintenance drones as roving eyes. With those assets in place, Singer should be able to locate any anomalies.

  The problem was, the Koregoi apparently hadn’t planned for the possibility of having to remove space leeches. So I was having to do it the hard way. At least it didn’t need an EVA. I wasn’t sure I had the stones to EVA into what was likely to become a live-fire situation.

  Singer was still raving about the brilliant qualities of his new friend.

  Actually . . . okay. I was a little jealous. But I wasn’t a million-an-old engineered hive mind, so I knew I couldn’t really compete for cool points.

  There’s only so much you can expect of any mortal sentience.

  I was aware of the bustle of combat preparation throughout Ops, despite having my upper body shoved inside a wall. Suit boots moved past in fits and groups, and sometimes they were joined by the click and scuff of Cheeirilaq’s feathery feet on the end of chitinous legs.

  “Please,” I intoned, pulling another crystalline plug that was probably some kind of holographic memory, if Singer and my guesses were right. “Tell me more.”

  “It’s old,” Singer said, deaf to irony. “But it’s a mind. And it thinks very slowly. Or rather, it thinks at lightspeed, but over vast distances. It might take it three hundred standard minutes to pass an idea around its sphere once, crossing and recrossing itself, overlapping in waves that can alter every time they interact. Every time one of the nodes kicks up a slightly different version of the idea, or makes an adjustment or responds to an alteration, that joins the ripples passing around the sphere. The metaphorical wave pattern changes and is changed.

  “Eventually, consensus is reached—think of it as the waves falling into a standing wave. Out of chaos, agreement emerges.”

  “That seems very impractical,” I said, wishing I had an autogrip. My tool kit was so many particles, slowly sliding into the accretion disk of the Saga-star. You made do.

  You made do.

  “The star was smaller when it was built,” Singer said. “And it wasn’t designed to make decisions in a hurry.”

  I came close to saying something sarcastic and Connla-like, but bit my tongue, thinking of my own history with hasty decision-making.

  “I don’t think it’s fair of you to critique the design of that structure without respect for the functions it was designed to perform,” Singer continued.

  I’d accidentally tuned him out for a minute. And he was defending his new boyfriend. “No, Singer. You’re right; I’m not being fair. So what is it meant to be thinking about? And why is it parked all the way out here?”

  “Well,” Singer said, “I’m not sure.”

  Of course not.

  “But it likes to answer questions.”

  “Can you ask it how to get away from a dozen pirates or so?”

  “I can try. I can’t guarantee it will come back with an answer before you—or the pirates—die of entropy. I think . . . I think it’s a reference librarian. Of sorts. The world’s biggest problem-solver. And”—he sounded almost embarrassed, which wasn’t a personality protocol I was aware of encountering in AIs before— “it likes to sing. It sings with itself. All its parts in harmony or counterpoint. So when it came out to meet us, it was singing to us to see what sort of thing we would sing. And since you had the, er, key—”

  “It likes you because you sing with it,” I hazarded.

  He didn’t answer.

  “Your new friend sounds pretty great,” I said.

  He sniffed, regaining something like a sense of humor. “Well, I think so.”

  “We’d never want to interfere with your thinking. So you’re telling me the— Does it have a name? Other than Eschaton Artifact? Because I have decided I really dislike that.”

  “I don’t think so,” he said slowly. “I don’t think the Koregoi named things. Not in the definite way we think of.”

  “Right, so it needs a name. Well, congratulations, Singer. You have finally found an ancient alien artifact that’s not so much a Big Dumb Object as a Big Smart Object.”

  “Well that’s a relief.”

  I looked at Singer, by which I mean I stared up into the access tube toward the ceiling, and I frowned. “It is?”

  “Sure,” he said. The walls of the Prize rang briefly, a soft chime. “It’s so usual for it to play out the other way.”

  “By the way, have you tried hailing the pirates?”

  “Neither they nor the Jothari are answering.”

  Of course he had. I fiddled a tiny . . . well, it might have been a capacitor. I determined to treat it as one. The worst that could happen was an electrocution. “So what do we call it? Aeonmind? Nornstar?”

  “Do we have to call it something?”

  “It’s like an ent,” I said.

  “Ent?” Singer asked.

  “From a book. They’re . . . sapient trees. Very old. They take a long time to make decisions. It was a good book. Could have been longer, but at least it had a lot of appendices.”

  “Ah,” Singer said. “I was thinking it was like Bao Zheng.”

  If I had felt smug about knowing something that Singer didn’t, that smugness had a short expiration.

  “I don’t know that one.”

  “Bao Zheng,” Singer said. “He’s a minor Earth god—demigod—of libraries and research.”

  “So like Thoth?”

  “Demigod.”

  “Thoth’s a real god?”

  Singer ignored me and said, “You can propitiate Bao Zheng with fruit to help you complete a research project.”

  “It seems like a god of research should be propitiated with cites and references,” I said.

  “Haimey!”

  “What?”

  “That’s sacrilege.”

  “Try it sometime,” I answered. “I bet you’ll find he’ll like it better.”

  “I don’t wor— You are engaged in the ancient human tradition of ‘pulling my leg.’ ”

  “Might be,” I a
dmitted. I barked my fingers on the tube wall and yelped.

  I rolled out from inside the tube. I heaved myself up—maybe I was getting used to the gravity, and Singer’s ability to reduce it helped—and stood, rubbing the small of my back.

  “I regret to inform you,” the shipmind said with utterly faux pomposity, “that I have no legs.”

  “We’ll fix that once we get your new robot body.”

  “I do not require a robot body.”

  I dusted my hands off, looking at the bustle around Ops. I had no idea what everybody was doing, but it looked important. “You do if I’m going to keep pulling your leg.”

  Singer changed the subject. “There’s something else.” There always was.

  “Baomind, if that is what we are calling it, is aware that its primary is destabilizing. It would like our help.”

  “Are you telling me your new friend . . . needs a lift?”

  “Its star is getting old.”

  “Tell me we’re not going to destabilize the star further if we pull a million zillion kilotons of orbitals away from it.”

  “You know I’m not programmed to lie.”

  I blinked, and didn’t mention the whopper he’d been broadcasting to Farweather all dia.

  “We have to help it!”

  “I . . . agree.”

  I located Connla in the flurry of activity. He was by Cheeirilaq, in front of the window. The Freeport and Jothari squadron was oppressively close behind them. We were ahead, for now, but they were gaining intermittently despite the fact that we were demonstrably faster than them. We could wink into white space, sure—and let them have this ancient and possibly impossibly powerful Koregoi artifact? I hadn’t said it, and Cheeirilaq hadn’t said it, and Singer hadn’t said it, and all the constables had been worriedly silent on the matter . . . and Connla hadn’t said it, so loud my ears rang with the absence. But the pirates and Jothari already had the gravity tech and were obviously learning how to use it. If they had the Baomind too . . .

  It was hard to imagine that they would have the resources for war. But it was hard for me to even imagine such a thing as a war. So running away and giving them unfettered access to enslave or suborn this ancient and apparently friendly alien AI was not, realistically, an option unless there was no way out while preserving ourselves.