Элизабет Бир - Ancestral Night

I held my hands out into the light so the gently moving webwork would sparkle. My clademothers were going to have a fit if they ever saw me again. We had a doctrine against body modification even for noncosmetic health or professional reasons, and even when I’d broken with them, I’d never gone out of my way to mod up. Except the zero-g adaptations, of course.

Now here I was covered in rainbow holograms.

Oh well. I wasn’t about to go looking for them. And if we ran into each other by chance—the sort of thing that inevitably happened in the biggest of universes—maybe I would get lucky and they wouldn’t recognize me.

“Guys, I seem to be developing some new senses.”

They—or at least Connla—gaped at me, so I unlocked my fox and tuned them in to my senso to prove it.

We hung there together like three ships in formation while I projected them into the tactile map of what I was perceiving. Singer figured out what I was up to pretty fast and took over rendering the feelings into a visualization. His version came out rather more accurate than mine, and faster too, as he had the cycles to throw at it.

All around us, the swoops and spirals of a convoluted landscape shivered into being. Singer’s sense of humor being what it was—the opposite of vestigial, though you’d never get to me admit that in his hearing—he decorated the projection with the traditional lines and circles of gravmap wireframe. Because it was a gravmap, and I was feeling the curvature of space-time it indicated—at a distance—through my skin.

Of the things that bind the universe together, gravity is not a particularly strong force, as it happens. It just… never stops reaching. That always sort of made me feel good about gravity. It’s always looking for the next rock, always sliding something down a breaker in space-time, whipping something in a long, arcing curve around something else. Gravity doesn’t give up. It keeps on trucking.

I won’t get into any solemn metaphorical particulars about the human spirit here, but you see what I’m driving at. I just really like gravity as a concept. As much as I hate having to operate under its influence.

I could tell from the way Singer was studying the map that he was feeling pretty positive about gravity too, just now.

“We can take a shortcut,” he said, thinking out loud for our benefit.

“You mean, use the existing folds in space-time to work with the drive compression, rather than brute-forcing across it. The old gravity whip trick, except in white space.”

“Gravity’s water slide,” Connla said, with the sense of a grin.

“Technically, all water slides are gravity’s,” Singer said. “Yes, Haimey. This should be enough to get us home. Within your projected lifetimes, based on available resources. And without eating the cats.”

THE CATS, BEING CATS, WEREsuitably ungrateful for their reprieve. By the time I got to check on them, Bushyasta was asleep next to the fridge, her paw hooked into a nylon grab loop. She had earned her name the old-fashioned way, by living up to it.

I had no idea where Mephistopheles had wandered off to.

I edged around Bushyasta and fixed myself a bubble of coffee, feeling relieved that the banter between Connla and me had picked back up in a much more natural and unstrained fashion. It was still going to take us a really long time to get home. A subjective eternity, I realized, as Singer started talking about his political theories again.

Still, not dying made up for a lot.

“Thanks, parasite,” I muttered.

The parasite didn’t answer.

Coffee is amazing, and one benefit of having only cats, an AI, and another human as shipmates is that I can drink it in public areas without grossing out the aliens. Something about the organic esters makes it smell—and taste—vile to just about every other ox-breathing syster I might find myself sharing an atmosphere with, so it’s considered polite to keep that particular stimulant among humans. People coming off the homeworlds are always a little frustrated that it’s considered incredibly rude to walk around with coffee everywhere they go.

This particular serving was the real stuff, too—some beans we keep, unroasted and green so they go stale less quickly, mostly for off-the-books barter with other humans when we need it, but also for special occasions. It’s so much better than the recon I usually wind up drinking that it might as well not even be the same plant.

Not dying was probably a special occasion, so I waited patiently for the cracking sounds and wisps of aroma as Singer roasted me a bubble’s worth of beans, flash-cooled them, scrubbed the smoke, and ground them up for me, then dispensed measured hot water and centrifuged the result to get the grounds out. It was delicious, and the caffeine buzzed pleasantly across my nerves, and I let it ride. Human beings have been bumping and tuning since we first learned how to chew bitter leaves for the alkaloid high; we’re just better at the nuances now.

I was just about to pick up Jane Eyre again, having nothing particular to do for the next couple of decians, when Singer cleared his throat and said, “Thank you for this map, Haimey.”

I let the screen float near me, but hung on to my coffee. If I set it aside, it would probably float there forgotten until it cooled, and this stuff was too good to waste. I savored a sip and said, “You’re welcome.”

“Maps like this would have some value, too,” he said diffidently.

“In more than one way.” I waved at the blurs of light outside, which were now contorting and lensing in rippled tortoiseshell patterns as Singer coasted us around the rim of some giant gravity well. We were accelerating again, too, though I couldn’t feel it through the ship. The parasite was keeping me informed, though, as I was learning to read the information this new sense was feeding me.

We had just become the only ship in the Synarche—as far as I knew—that could navigate and course-correct while in white space.

I didn’t have time to really let the implications sink in, because I was busy running for my life and the lives of my best friends. But I knew it changed everything; it would speed up transit times, make it easier to correct after critical failures like the spin out of control that had gotten us here in the first place, possibly even put Singer and Connla and me out of a job by improving safety in white space and making it that much less likely that ships would get trapped inside white bubbles and not be able to find their way home.

It would have military implications as well. What if a ship could fight without leaving white space? Attack another vessel en passant? Bombard a fragile, infinitely vulnerable planet?

Worlds… were so terribly easy to destroy.

That would make us all the more desirable to the pirates as a prize, if they found out about it.

Well, that was a problem for another dia.

“I don’t follow,” Singer said.

“Don’t you think being able to get there faster on less fuel would be of benefit to us when competing with other tugs?”

“Hmm.” I figured he was running calculations on where the greatest social and personal benefits were.

I was wrong.

“I was just thinking,” Singer said slowly, “of what an operation like ours would have been able to accomplish, even a centad or two ago. So many ships used to get lost.”

“We’re still pulling some of them back,” I reminded him.

“Can you imagine coming out here in all this dark in a sublight ship?” he asked. “Most of the generation ships have never been even located, let alone recovered.”

“Generation ships,” I echoed, feeling a chill.