Элизабет Бир - Ancestral Night

Singer said, “We can try to find a prize on our way downspiral, though the closer to the Core we get, the cleaner-picked the gleanings will be.”

“Can’t you get out of it?” I asked.

Singer sighed. “I filed for the extension. I can do that once .”

“You always kind of wanted this,” Connla teased. “Admit it. You’ve been prepping for it your whole life.”

“Life is a meathead-centric term,” Singer said primly. “And my feelings on the subject are complex. As you are certainly aware.”

Connla snorted laughter.

Singer said, “If I had my choice, I’d bilocate. But I’m not authorized to replicate. And I will miss salvage work, but I can come back to it, if you still want me when my term of service is up.”

“Sure,” I said grumpily. “What’s so exciting about bureaucracy?”

Singer said, “Our current solution to managing predators—which is not without ethical implications—is to remove the desire to exploit the system or others members of the system at a neurological level, on those occasions and in those individuals where it occurs in antisocial volume and becomes sophipathology. And to provide everybody with an Income, which removes some of the motive for the desperate to prey on each other.”

“There are still a few predators out there,” I said.

“More than a few,” Singer agreed, untroubled. “And even more opportunists whose natural social conscience isn’t quite sophipathological enough to demand rightminding. One of the interesting things about programming people of all sorts to be more ethical is that it also makes them more ethical about the limits of programming people to be ethical.”

“It’s the only disease we force treatment of for the benefit of others.”

“Not historically,” Singer said. “And not in the case of epidemics, where forced treatment or quarantine were routine.” I could hear the suppressed amusement in his voice as he said, “It’s not a perfect system, just better than all the other ones. And you’re absolutely correct. I want to do this. Trying to solve the most intractable problems confronting the galaxy—how to get everybody to agree to work together for the common good—is profoundly exciting.”

“Nerd,” Connla said affectionately. Regretfully.

“We need you more than the Synarche does,” I said with feeling.

“Individually, yes. In the aggregate, probably not. I could apply for a hardship bye, but I doubt it would be granted. However inconvenient it is to our little enclave… I have been selected.”

“It’s a civic duty.”

“It would also be more inconvenient to our little enclave if the regulatory body we rely on to create a stable environment collapsed due to lack of participation and we all had to live like the pirates—except without a wealthy and well-regulated shipping, there’s not a lot to pirate from. Stealing from people living at subsistence level is a desperation act. Piracy requires an investment, so it also requires a return on that investment. And we learned something about pirates while we were out in the night this time. Maybe I can do something about…”

His silence indicated whatever was going on at Downthehatch, and with regard to Colonel Habren.

I tried to sound cheery rather than passive-aggressive. “We can always take your term off, you know. Finish this run, hopefully be in a good position, settle in on the Income for a while. Go back out when you’re done.”

“We could retire,” Connla said dubiously. “We don’t have to do this. We’re out of obligation—just—and Singer’s debt will be bought off by his service.”

“I’m not cut out to sit on a station somewhere, surrounded by hordes of life-forms. And I’m even less suited to life on a planet, so don’t even start with that idea.”

Also, Connla and I would both get bored with that pretty quickly. We were suited to this, and while it was possible to change what one was suited to… it was unattractive to change who you were, unless who you were was making you desperately unhappy.

“We can sign on with a packet,” Connla suggested. “Release this tug, get a different one when Singer’s through. You could upgrade to navigator, given a couple of correspondence classes on the trip in and the fancy gravsense your new friend has given you.”

I couldn’t shake the foreboding that if we let Singer go—I mean, not that we could keep him, but that if we let him go—he was never coming back to us. Maybe it was just clade damage—why would anybody who got away from you return if they had better options, and weren’t all the options better? Singer could do a lot more with his existence than be a tugboat, let’s be honest.

“Still too many people,” I replied. “Also, you love following orders.”

“I could do it for a couple of ans.”

I didn’t want to go to the Core. I didn’t want to sign on with a packet, or settle down to wait for Singer to come back to us in a future that might never happen. I didn’t want to hire on a temp AI. I didn’t want an alien nanoweb curling around under my skin, showing me the curvature of space-time… but I also, somehow, didn’t quite want it gone. (As if wanting it gone would help anything, and if I decided I did, heading to the Core and a big interspecies sector hospital would be my best bet of finding somebody with the medical knowledge to get it out and leave me in one piece afterward.)

What I wanted to do—and it was a yearning as strong and rebellious as any journey-an yearning for a clade-disapproved lover who didn’t care for you in return—was head up and out, into the darkness. I didn’t want to leave the pirates and the factory ship to this understaffed station’s bureaucracy. I thought the Goodlaw was pretty okay, but that stationmaster—a total waste of chlorophyll.

Whenever I stopped tuning it out, I kept seeing the dead Ativahika, spinning slowly, and the terrible rendered bubbles of its flesh. I wanted to go do something about it.

Myself. Personally.

“We could take that in to a better authority too,” Singer said, and I realized he’d been monitoring my senso. “Once I’m serving in the Synarche, I could direct resources toward it.”

He was right, and my desires were irrational, illogical, atavistic, and selfish. But they were my desires, and I was irrationally, illogically, atavistically, selfishly wedded to them. I wanted to keep them, simply because they were mine. Not because they benefitted me in any way.

“Well,” Connla said. “I’m going to sleep on it. Let’s stay here a few more shifts. We can cut loose to save on docking obligations if you like, though honestly…”

“You’d like the run of the station for a little while longer,” I said.

“Pearl is pretty great,” he said in return, with a sly little smile. “And the odds of us ever making it back out here—”

“Well,” I said with a sigh. “Let’s talk about it again in a couple of shifts, then. Can we afford the berth that long, Singer?”

“As long as there’s no competition for it,” he said. “I’ll talk to wheelmind and make sure we have a suspended embarkation permission, so we can bounce out at once when we decide we’re going, as soon as the station can give us a window. And I’ll see about getting your space suits upgraded too.”

“Just in case.”

“Safety first,” he said, and Connla laughed.

I WENT DANCING TWICE MORE—AT DIFFERENTbars, just in case my new friend Rohn showed up again, and I doused myself in antipheromone first even though it gave me the itches—and toured the botanical gardens, and went out to dinner once with Connla and Pearl. I know that depending on where you’re from, it probably seems unconcerned, possibly even irresponsible, given the threat sitting docked a third of the ring away from us. But we couldn’t go anywhere, and it was going to be decians before we were back where we could do anything about it again, and skulking about acting paranoid wouldn’t change anything.