Элизабет Бир - Ancestral Night

Her guards drew back as I approached. They stayed close enough to intervene if she—shackled, locked out of her own body except as permitted by the tightly engineered, quicksilver AI stuck on her head whose only purpose was to thwart her—“tried something.”

I know she came from outside. I know she was raised by monsters who ate each other as a matter of course.

I know we had to give her time to want to be managed before we could teach her to manage herself.

Had the AI whose life’s work was now making sure Zanya Farweather didn’t use her alien symbiote to crush the entire prison wing of the hospital gotten a vote in where it served?

Farweather looked me right in the eye. Without preamble or any kind of gentle transition, she said, “You secretly wanted me to win. You’d be happier if you could allow yourself to admit it.”

What I actually wanted, deep in my barbarian heart, was to see her messily dead in a half dozen variously sized pieces. But I was too self-aware—and too beset with ethics!—to act on that.

There was no point in relitigating old woes. We need each other, and we need literature, and we need knowledge—and we need, very much, to try to be accountable for our own failings and to live up to our best selves. That reality might seem subjective and foolish to Farweather, but it seems objective and rational to me.

We cannot choose where we come from, but we can choose where we are going, and we can choose the routes we’re willing to take to try to get there.

“Whatever lets you sleep at night, Farweather.”

She rubbed the shiny metal arc fused to her skull. “They used you.”

“Oh. And you didn’t?”

I thought that would quell her. I didn’t want to have this conversation, and I really didn’t want to have this conversation in front of some certain percentage of Justice.

It didn’t.

She said, “You still blame yourself for Niyara.”

I made my expression stone.

Zanya Farweather could never take a fucking hint. “If you blame yourself, that means you think you had the power to stop it.”

“But I didn’t?” A second after I spoke, I cursed myself for responding. But I had, and now I was stuck with it.

“You didn’t,” Farweather confirmed.

I shook my head. “Bullshit. I knew Niyara. If I hadn’t been blinded by my hormones, I would have seen her coming. Seen that she was using me.”

“But you didn’t see her coming.”

“Now you sound like you’re blaming me.”

She settled back against the wall. “It feels good to pretend you’re to blame, doesn’t it?”

“What?” I said. “It feels awful.”

“But it lets you assert some power over the situation. Some agency. If it’s your fault, you weren’t just a helpless dupe, right? But if somebody else tells you that you weren’t just a helpless dupe, you get angry.”

I looked at her.

She looked at me. The only light came from the airlock on the prison transport, two steps away with its outer door open. It fell in dim stripes across her face.

I’d missed it, somewhere. The place where she’d moved the goalposts. I could feel that it had happened, but I couldn’t see the spot.

“They’re probably recording this,” I said.

“They probably are.” She shrugged.

“I do think about having done something different,” I admitted. What did it hurt me to be honest with her? To be vulnerable?

She was going away.

I said, “I think about if there was something I might have missed. It’s not… intrusive. Not anymore, not the way it used to be.”

“Sure,” she said. “You got your brain fiddled with to remove the guilt, the blame. Even the memories. So why don’t you fiddle your brain to make the rest of it go away also?”

“I thought your lot didn’t hold with brain-fiddling.”

She winked. “I don’t judge how other people live their lives.”

I leaned against the wall and watched her through the bars. “You’d rather be in jail forever than submit to Recon.”

“They could just force me.”

I smiled. “We’re not complete barbarians.”

She laughed. She tapped her suppressor.

It almost felt companionable. I thought I might miss her.

I said, “You know that thing about not having a real me? That I told you on the Prize?”

Her face smoothed. “I think I remember it.”

I smiled.

“I take that back,” I said. “The real me is the me I’ve decided to be. Somebody decided to be that person. Somebody built her. That’s the real me. And not the me anybody else thinks I ought to be, or ought to have been.”

She frowned.

I looked at her.

She looked at me.

“Goodbye, Zanya,” I said. “I hope you figure some stuff out, eventually.”

I turned away.

The deck plates rattled faintly as she stepped forward. Two constables stepped forward as well. They didn’t touch her yet, and I approved.

She said, “Enjoy belonging to the machine, babes.”

Another rustle as she stepped back, while I walked away. I let her have the last word. I didn’t really need to answer.

It didn’t feel so bad, to belong.

I started writing this book in 2014, because my friend and occasional editor Simon Spanton, then with Gollancz, was looking for a big-idea space opera and I happened to have a big idea lying around waiting for an excuse to stretch. It is now 2018. Writing this novel has taken longer than I anticipated to get it finished (sometimes life gets in the way, and sometimes creativity does not operate on schedule), and the world this book is being born into is not the world it was conceived in. There have been a lot of changes along the way—personal, professional, and political—but I think the book is stronger for all of that.

I’m pretty happy with it. I hope you, the reader, find it worth the wait.

I would like to offer my very sincere thanks to everyone who helped along the way with getting it off the ground. This is a diverse cast of characters that includes but is not limited to:

Ben Tippett and Benjamin C. Kinney, who respectively helped me out with cosmology and neuroscience. Mistakes and willful deviations are of course my own.

Jennifer Jackson and Michael Curry of the Donald Maass Literary Agency.

My fine editors Simon Spanton (who acquired it); Gillian Redfearn and Navah Wolfe (who edited it); and Deanna Hoak, who copyedited it.

The design, production, marketing, and publicity teams at Gollancz and Saga, who are responsible for the gorgeous package you hold in your hands (or read on your screen) and the fact that you even heard about it and that it then made its way into your possession in the first place.

Marissa Lingen and Amanda Downum, who beta-read the first draft and talked me off the roof about it.

Liz Bourke, Fran Wilde, Amal El-Mohtar, Jamie Rosen, Fade Manley, Celia Marsh, Alex Haist, Max Gladstone, Devin Singer, C. L. Polk, Arkady Martine, Vivian Shaw, Jodi Meadows, John Wiswell, Sarah Monette, Amber van Dyk, and Stella Evans: all the critters in the ZOO. (Yes, it’s a terrible pun. I didn’t start it. Haimey would love it, though.)

Andre Norton, Iain Banks, C. J. Cherryh, and James White, whose works grew me into the person who would want to write this book.

My family, who are those rare birds when it comes to artist relatives: they never doubted me once. And my many friends who have listened to me alternately kvetch and crow as I worked my way through the inevitable black holes and supernovae of composition.

The Wijktory Kjittens and the Giant Ridiculous Dog, who conspired between them to keep me from taking myself or my deadlines too seriously.