Элизабет Бир - Ancestral Night

I tapped the wall to turn myself around.

“All right.” Connla floated over oh-so-casually. He was wearing a film too, which made me feel both rejected and relieved. Nobody likes to feel like a pariah. But nobody really wants to infect their friends with an alien space plague, either. It’s all about the compromise.

And owning your own shit, I suppose.

“Let’s see what it looks like,” he said. He anchored himself and held his gloved forehands out for mine.

I forced myself to follow his gaze down naturally, mimicking what a natural human who wasn’t freaking out completely would naturally do. I lifted my forehands inside their transparent film sheaths and laid them gently over his.

The right one still felt strange. Heavy. Warm. Not painfully so, just… heavier than it should have been. Or, I should say, it had more inertia. My hand felt dense—but not big, not swollen. Just massive . Unbalancingly so.

He gave me a gentle squeeze, and my eyes focused. It’s rare for Connla to touch anybody, because it’s discouraged where he comes from, and he always seems to let out some kind of deep metaphorical sigh of relief when he finally finds an excuse to. Even if there’s two layers of sterilization in the middle.

Also, if he wasn’t afraid to touch me, then I could be not afraid to look.

It was both better than I had feared—and worse. The skin of my left hand looked unchanged—dark, normal, paler on the ventral surfaces, colored ochre in the creases of the palms. The skinned surfaces had already healed without a scar, which reminded me to make sure my ankle got fixed, as well. And freaked me out a little, because I had not had time to make repairs myself yet.

But on the right one, under the transparent top layers of epidermis, over the pigment of the dermis and the buried red of the blood, something moved and shone.

It looked like veils of minute glitter, gold dust maybe, strands and threads of tinsel, fiber optic, fishnet moonlight. It looked like streaks and clots of tiny stars swept up in the veils of iridescent nebulae. I couldn’t tell if it shone, whatever it was, because it was bright in the command cabin. But it definitely caught and reflected what light there was, as if my hand and forearm were gloved in a mesh of holographic wire spangled with faceted crystals, each too small for the eye to individually see. The overall effect was that of reflected white light, but every so often a single beam would catch a colored sparkle, and reflect it straight into my eye.

Get it out of me. I wanted to chew my own forehand off to make it go away. I wasn’t supposed to look like this. My body wasn’t supposed to be this way.

Then Singer said the most perfectly Singer thing he could have. “It looks like a slime mold growth pattern.”

My heart rate dropped. I took a breath and saw the nearly invisible film billow ever so slightly, rippling my field of vision. “A slime mold?”

“Sure,” he said. “The Synarche use them to map trade routes for effective resource delivery. It looks like that. Or like… cobwebs.”

If I was going to retreat from panic into Singer Land, I was going for the distraction with all four hands. “How does a cobweb differ from, like, a regular web? Like a neural web or whatever?”

Singer sighed. He sometimes forgets that the rest of us don’t have memory banks the size of a planet. Or the processing cycles to hold twenty conversations at once, navigate a starship, read up on fungi, and probably practice juggling in VR simulation simultaneously, for all I know. And then there’s the politics junkie aspect. These diar I don’t care about the government very much, as long as it gets its job done and stays out of my way. I used to have a girlfriend who was pretty radical, though, and after I realized how toxic some of her ideas were… well, it wasn’t a good breakup. I kind of unplugged from the idea that you might want to revolutionize a system that mostly works because it chafes you in one particular spot.

So sometimes our conversations are way over my head. But this time we were talking about something that had infected my body , so I actually could have used it if he were a little more engaged.

“So when we talk about webs,” he said, “we’re actually using a metaphor referring to an organic capture structure used by certain predatory Terran animals—

“Spiders!” Connla interrupted, delighted. A one-track entomologist.

“Among others. Anyway, anything that looked like a web got called a web.”

“Right,” I said, interested in the etymology and entomology lessons, but not so thoroughly I forgot my original question. I mean, I could have just hotsearched it, but what’s the point in living with an AI if you don’t use it as an excuse for laziness once in a while. “So you didn’t answer my question. What’s a cobweb?”

“I know this one,” Connla said. “If a sheltered place was left abandoned or uncleaned for a long time—someplace where weather couldn’t get inside to wash away the old webs—then spiders would just keep spinning more and more of them in place. They would collect dust and old insect parts and become almost like—draperies. Uneven. Stretched from point to point. Tattered. Looked kind of like trade routes, actually.”

I shuddered. Connla grew up on a planet. I was space-raised, and found the idea of anything as unpredictable, violent, and generally murderous as planetary weather frankly nerve-wracking.

“Do you know about the slime molds?”

I tried not to stare at my hands through the isolation film. I wanted to pick at my skin. Except the stuff felt pretty good, whatever it was. My skinned palms—healed completely—tingled. The sensations of waves of heaviness in my right forepalm made it feel as if it were being soothed and stretched. Almost like a massage.

And it was… weirdly… pretty.

Great. The parasite is affecting the host’s perceptions.

“Tell me about the slime molds, Singer.”

“So if you dot nutrition sources into a media in a particular pattern, then introduce slime mold spores, the mold will grow through the media in—generally—the most efficient manner to exploit those nutrition sources. The pattern winds up looking a lot like what’s on your hand, and it’s an effective model for how to develop efficient packet routes.”

I squinted at my arm, and shuddered again. I could see it, actually; the pale veils and filaments on my dark complexion did look a little like a two-dimensional map of a three-dimensional set of paths, stretched out between and connecting a number of nodes.

“So somebody put a route map in me?”

“It would be irresponsible to come to conclusions based on so little information,” Singer said primly. “However, one of the things it resembles is a route map.”

“All right,” Connla said. “I’m going to take a needle biopsy for Singer to analyze. You’ll feel a little stab, and the film will seal it, right?”

“Right.” He was doing doctorspeak, narrating his actions to help me anticipate and stay calm. I appreciated it, even though I knew this as well as he did and I was so hopped up on my own tuning that all the anxiety and even outright fear seemed light-ans away and on the wrong end of a telescope. Still there; just really hard to locate and get a concrete look at.

He bellied the film at the injury site—which had also healed completely—out a bit, and jabbed me. It was a big needle and it hurt, but when he pulled it out again, it didn’t leave behind a hole, or so much as a drop of blood.

“Wild,” he said.

“Did you get anything?”

He held it up so I could see the wormlike ribbon of aspirated flesh inside the tube. That made me think of intestinal parasites, too. Then he turned around, and put the whole syringe in a drawer that Singer extended to accept it. Singer would extract the sample and break the syringe down into components, ready to print a new one, or something else—a process that incidentally sterilized it, as very few viruses or bacteria could infect or reproduce after being reduced to their component atoms for more compact storage.