Элизабет Бир - Ancestral Night

The sparkles outlined my nailbeds as I studied the back of my hand, gleaming with kaleidoscopic light. Singer waited me out, so eventually I prompted, “You have a theory, though?”

Of course he did. To his credit, he managed not to sound smug as he said, “It makes sense to theorize that it wasn’t intended as a booby trap. But to protect the person who triggered the blow.”

“Right,” I said. “Of course. The pirates had an inside being. Somebody in the crew of the factory ship who made those modifications, triggered the blow, and hopefully survived to be picked up by the pirate ship. The parasite heals, and gives you a sense of direction in space, and that needle was designed to go through a standard-issue space suit and seal up the hole it left behind itself. So the inside alien installs and flips the switch their pirate contacts have given them, gets jabbed and blown into space with everybody else—but they’re wearing a suit. And they trigger their beacon and get picked up, parasite and all?”

“I’d need a little extra protection to be willing to risk that,” Connla said. “That’s the kind of crazy motherfucker you don’t mess with, somebody who would do something like that. Never mind that the ship was in a bubble when it happened.”

“Safer than a fight against a whole ship’s complement, probably,” I said. “And the crew of a ship doing something as illegal as rendering down Ativahikas would be armed, wouldn’t it?”

“Why not inject yourself with the parasite first, and then push the button?” Singer asked.

I gazed in the direction of his central core. “You’ve met engineers.”

Singer sighed.

“Still,” Connla said softly.

“Yeah,” I answered. “Still.”

I didn’t mention my ongoing curiosity about where they’d obtained the Koregoi senso in the first place, let alone learned to use it. Or my realization that it meant the pirates had at least one person who could do the same space-time surfing tricks I apparently could.

Was that the presence I had sensed?

Probably, they had more than one such person. Because if you had some ancient alien nanotech symbiote that would let you feel your way around the dark-matter lattices of the universe, you’d probably want to share it with all the people you trusted. As long as there weren’t unknown terrible side effects to being infected with alien space plague, I mean. I was sorry Connla hadn’t wound up with it; as pilot, he would have been able to react faster if he weren’t surfing my senso to read the gravity map.

I wondered if it had come off the factory ship, and was somehow related to the artificial gravity. I hoped the pirates didn’t have the means, or didn’t care enough, to try to track us with it. The mythical Admiral might have been able to do it, but the Admiral had the advantage of being a tall tale, which gave her the power to do whatever was narratively interesting. Folding space with an Alcubierre-White drive leaves enough eddies in the space-time continuum that I could feel them pretty clearly, and I was really new at this stuff.

Go the other way, I thought, and comforted myself that they’d want to hang on to their prize, not chase some random space tug across the galaxy.

The thing about Ativahikas is not that they’re giant, or sapient, or weirdly gorgeous, though they are all of those things. When they haven’t been horribly butchered, they look a bit like a Terran leafy sea dragon, or those motile sentient sea-trees from Desireninex. They’re seaweedy and ragged and layered in fringe like the dress of a medieval queen, and their symbiotic algae turns them into a shifting, iridescent play of brilliant shades of indigo, cobalt, teal, and jade and emerald greens. And the reason people kill them is not for any intrinsic quality of their own—it’s for those algae. Or the metabolic byproducts thereof.

Certain more complex and nuanced combinations of organics are, as I mentioned before, hard to synthesize and print in exactly the right harmonies. You can make a burger that tastes like umami and salt, sure—that’s not terribly difficult. Coffee that tastes like coffee is, at the current state of the art, impossible, and chocolate or vanilla that actually taste like chocolate or vanilla… Well, Terra has a healthy luxury export market in those.

Likewise, devashare.

Easy enough to synthesize, get you high as hell. If your existence is unbearable, it helps relieve the misery. Most people don’t even know, I suppose, that the drug was originally isolated from compounds derived from Ativahika symbiotes. But—from what the connoisseurs tell me, I wouldn’t know myself—the synthetic stuff bears the same relationship to the harvested as pot-still white lightning does to a good aged whiskey. Which is to say, it gets the job done, as long as getting your head blasted open is the only job you care about doing.

I spent a little bit of time using the synthetic stuff pretty heavily after I left my clade. A lot of people who go through that kind of transition do. You manage to disentangle yourself, but then you’re out in the hard, cold universe and suddenly everybody is disagreeing with you—and you have no idea how to manage disagreement and how awful it makes you feel, having never experienced it at all.

And I had a traumatic relationship to recover from, which I was still blaming myself for. But of course that’s what people leaving one kind of damaging situation do—they find another one, slightly different in some aspects, and they try to exert control over it. Even more disagreement to manage, and a lot of blame. From a lot of directions.

Devashare is great for that. Better than THC, or alcohol.

Eventually, I realized that I was wasting my time, and if I wanted to hide from humanity in a bottle, I was better off making it a titanium one with a warp drive and a couple of carefully selected companions. I got over my clade-reaction issues with neurochemical control enough to seek professional chemical stabilization, and I used my clade-trained engineering background and aptitude to get into a tech program and Made Something of Myself.

These diar, I get a lot more reading done.

Synthetic devashare isn’t expensive. You can print it from readily available components, if you are someplace with a permissive substance policy. But the good stuff—the nightmare stuff—that’s not the sort of thing that you can get just anywhere. It’s virulently illegal everywhere with a government, as you’d hope any intoxicant rendered from the murdered flesh of presumed sentients would be. So it’s the sort of thing you hear rumors about the wealthy and dissolute obtaining, or trying to obtain—the same way you hear rumors about certain debauched privileged types throwing noncon kink parties and similar nasty things.

There are people, even now, who manage to elude rightminding to the point where they enjoy their pleasures more if somebody else suffers to provide them.

Two decians later, we didn’t have any answers, but we’d all kind of gotten used to having the not-a-parasite around. And we were still calling it the not-a-parasite, even though it had proven pretty useful.

We’d moved on, in most of our intramural discussions about The One That Got Away, to mourning our loss of the gravity tech and theorizing extensively about its origins and whether or not the pirates were more interested in that or in the results of the factory ship’s abominable business. We hadn’t come to any conclusions on that front, either—but at least the conversation, as a sport, had served to see us home. ( Home , in this case, being a relative term meaning “At least technically close enough to an inhabited system to beg for help and hope we might be heard.”)