Элизабет Бир - Ancestral Night

“They gave up a lot of bunk space to have that gravity installed,” I said. “I think the Milk Chocolate Marauder is a… not a prototype. What’s the word I want?” I quicksearched and came up with it. “A test-of-concept. Somebody took this existing vessel and installed this tech in it, to see if it would work out and what the immediate flaws were before they spent the resources prototyping.”

My muscles ached. My spine felt like somebody was stepping on my head, and my afthands were killing me. I crouched, and rested my elbows on my knees. “Guys, I need a break.”

“Take five,” Connla said.

I drank some water and chewed another yeast tablet. Mmm, yeast. Just like mommas used to make.

“Logically,” Singer said, “if you were a species who found lack of gravity even more physiologically damaging than you humans do, you’d be eager to find a technological solution. Do you think they would have gone with their full normal gravity? Or something a little less fatiguing?”

I was about ready to lie down on one of those padded shelves from dealing with what they had installed, and I’d only been in it for ten minutes. “I’m against gravity in general. Nasty stuff.”

There were syster races that couldn’t run their circulatory systems without it, though. Or keep their electrolyte balance. Which was a lot worse than the human problem of our bones falling apart. Singer had a spinlounge for us to exercise in—a little bubble on his belly that rotated and made gs.

Connla and I were supposed to spend about a standard hour a dia in there. He was better about it than I was. But he was planet-born. And liked looking muscular. I wished I’d been more diligent.

I might have been wishing past-me had traded past suffering for current suffering, but somewhere back there, past-me was probably gloating about having shifted the load.

Speaking of bones falling apart, mine felt like they were doing that right now. Chips working loose as I waited. Inches of height being crushed away.

Connla said, “So if this is partial pull, just enough to get by on, their homeworld is pretty dense.”

“Or pretty large. And they’re pretty large too,” Singer said. “That narrows down the syster field a little.”

“About half again as wide and half again as tall as a big Terran,” I agreed, eyeing the bunks. “Really heavy, if this is like one-quarter g for them. Dense? Muscular? Or lightly engineered?”

“Are you recovered enough to keep moving?” Singer asked, conciliatory.

“Don’t blow smoke in my intakes,” I answered, and stood. I managed not to groan, too. Very loudly, anyway.

The other side of the room had a drape, not another hatch to fight with, which was soothing. Rings at both top and bottom rattled as I slid it back. I remembered to step over the bottom rod, and left it pulled open behind me.

This pass-through led me directly to what seemed like it had to be a galley. Not the ship’s galley, I didn’t think—it seemed too small for all this space, and… “Who builds a starship this big, anyway?” I asked.

Singer said, “I have been asking myself the same thing, Haimey. It’s a very strange allocation of resources. Even if you had unlimited resources, which of course physics eventually interferes with, fuel is expensive to carry, because you need fuel to carry your fuel, and the cost stacks. Big ships cost more. No one needs the space for cargo, because there is no cargo this bulky worth shipping at interstellar distances. The evidence suggests that the crew species is large, but not that much larger than humans. And the more sensor data I retrieve regarding the target vessel, the more it seems that much of the interior is hollow. There’s an open space, an interior cavity, taking up five-sixths or so of its volume.”

“Looks like the crew fended for themselves, foodwise, rather than having a centralized kitchen and mess,” I said, looking around at what appeared to be a prep area.

Plenty of syster races out there did not make Food Time the social bonding activity that my species tended to. They tended to be pretty utilitarian in their dining habits, too.

“This galley is pretty standard for zero g, actually. Food storage in here—” I pulled open the drawers one by one. There had been some atmosphere left in there: it puffed out and crystallized, falling to the deck in deep-space snow quite fast, with no air pressure to slow it. Looked like oxy and a little water vapor, maybe some carbon dioxide. Dense mix by the quantity of snow, but that made sense if they were from a heavy world. “And this looks like a microwave heating or sterilization unit of some sort. The gravity is definitely a refit, and a new one. But you were saying, about resource allocation. Different out here, of course, where you have to bring or make everything. But it’s not like we’ve been paying a station fee for air for… centuries, now. Ever since the Synarche, right? There’s enough stuff to go around.”

“There will always be those who benefit from inequality, and so seek to perpetuate it,” Singer said darkly. “Humans have struggled throughout existence with the hierarchal desire.”

“Except when we’ve embraced it,” I answered. Singer likes history. And, well help me, politics. “I wish I’d clipped a nanospanner set. This panel looks jury-rigged, like it was repaired in flight. I want to see what’s behind it.”

I felt along the edges, prying a little.

Singer was on a roll. “Even if there’s enough of every resource for every individual to allocate as much of it as they desire to any personal whim, there are those whose personal whims include being able to lord it over the other guy because they have more stuff than he does. And there are those whose personal whims involve having special stuff that nobody else can have.”

“Keeps the fine artists in business,” I said.

Connla said, “If they get too antisocial about it, there’s rightminding.”

“Or they can ship themselves off to the Republic of Pirates,” Singer agreed. Which wasn’t what the pirates called themselves and their weird, loosely organized, retrograde association of space hideouts. But there they were, robbing colony worlds and the occasional packet ship or passenger ferry, making their money the old-fashioned way. There were regular rumors in the news packets that the pirates would soon rise up and strike a blow for democracy, because that makes about as much sense as instituting a Galactic Empire or something. People get very enamored of these archaic forms of government, and Singer likes to tell us about them in detail.

According to Singer, it turns out that ten thousand amateurs taken on average are usually better at coming up with a workable solution than one expert is. Anybody that’s ever heard an unrehearsed crowd sing a familiar melody accurately has witnessed this in action.

Democracy was a low-tech hack for putting this into practice. We have better hacks now.

I guess it was the best they could do at the time. But it strikes me as a bad way, in the long term, of assuring both communal well-being and individual freedom of choice and expression, as the groups and individuals with the most social dominance will wind up getting their way—and enforcing their norms on everyone. Might as well go back to everybody squabbling over resources and living in stone castles and hitting each other with spears.

I still remember the trip when he was obsessed with the utopian communists out near the Crushed Velvet Sea Slug system—speaking of archaic systems—and how their system compared both favorably and unfavorably with the Synarche. Both, for example, guarantee a humane subsistence, but the Synarche uses datagen to allot resources above that for specific, socially beneficial purposes, based on how they benefit the collective—and individuals and polities within it as well.