Элизабет Бир - Ancestral Night

“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 admitted. 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.

Though what we could do while running away as fast as we possibly could, I wasn’t certain.

At least they didn’t seem to have figured out how to weaponize the gravity yet. I should really get on that.

Perhaps I was being reasonably avoidant about building weapons.

My next job, however, was going to be getting into the symbiote’s senso and trying to help us find some sexy space-time curves to surf down.

Pretty soon, one way or another, we were going to have to duck.

I still couldn’t feel Farweather. I could feel the Freeporter and Jothari ships, however, and they were taking up more of my attention than I liked. Like somebody sliding into your personal space centimeter by centimeter, and not being subtle about it.

I started toward my friends. “Try it now, Singer.”

“Try what?”

“Locating Farweather. I quit messing around with all the electrogravimagnetic stuff this ship uses to monitor hull integrity and just got you some plain old-fashioned drone cameras. They should be available now.”

“I… have her. She is on the hull, as you suggested.”

Fuck, yeah! I nearly shouted. But I’m a professional, so I nursed my scuffed fingers quietly as I joined Connla and the Goodlaw by the windows.

“Gentlebeings,” I said. “I believe we can find you a pirate now.”

Unexpected side effects of a systemic alien nanotechnology infection may include migraine.

Yep, that was exactly what I needed right now. Apparently the combination of the pirate armada and the mirrors of the Baomind bending space-time plus whatever Farweather was doing to confound my senses was giving me an absolutely pounding headache that only partially responded to bumping my endocrine system. It was bad enough to make me nauseated.