Элизабет Бир - Ancestral Night

I realized I’d drifted to the window when my nose brushed it. It didn’t get me appreciably closer to the corpse of the Ativahika, and it didn’t cut down on the glare; the viewport covers have a nonreflective coating that makes them, to all intents, invisible. But it’s instinct; people will steer their craft into objects that have attracted their attention.

I caught the rail with my afthands to keep from bumping my nose again. Rubbing my nose gently, I stroked the port with my other hand to enlarge the view.

A living Ativahika looks more like an elongated seahorse than a whale. They’re bilaterally symmetrical, with a frilled head and a tapered neck, trailed by their ridged body and fronded tail. The whole is covered with their seaweed-like appendages, though I have no idea whether that evolved for some mysterious reason in space, or it’s a holdover from wherever they arose. Evolution doesn’t bother to pitch stuff out until it has a reason, and sometimes not even then. The deep, glossy green color is a chlorophyll analogue—a pigment that converts light and carbon dioxide into oxygen and sugar. It’s a symbiote. The Ativahika itself metabolizes oxygen and produces carbon dioxide. Each creature is its own ecosystem in miniature.

Unbelievably, among all the weird and wonderful systers—the methane breathers, the ones that use ammonia as a solvent instead of H 2O—they have a biology that is not particularly dissimilar to our own. Unbelievably, because they look like the most alien creature imaginable.

Their bodies are up to ten kilometers in length, and arranged with almost boring normalcy around a central nervous system with a brain and a spinal cord and even a spine. Their bones, rather than being made of calcites, are silicates that they extract by chewing up asteroids, space rocks, and—with particular gusto—the debris that forms planetary rings, which is also where they get their water. They’re in the H 2O solvent club along with us. Their blood is even red; the stuff they use to carry oxygen is a close-enough hemoglobin analogue that you could probably make black pudding out of it. If you were some sort of cannibalistic barbarian willing to eat the flesh of sentients, I mean.

Their most spectacular trait, and the one whose absence had slowed my recognition of this particular piece of once-living space debris, is the spread of their fins or wings or filaments. There’s a good deal of argument over what to call the appendages, which spring from the Ativahika’s ridged body like a forest of kelp from a stone. The fins are varying shades of green, depending on their age—from apple-bright to mossy stone. They have variegated edges, and they float and trail around the Ativahika’s body inertially in the weightless, frictionless, air-currentless environment of space. They undulate with the Ativahika’s movement, and serve to increase its surface area for photosynthesis. They also may serve some sensory purpose: nobody knows—nobody human, anyway, none of the humans of my acquaintance have ever seemed to know, and I’ve never had the opportunity to ask a syster.

This particular specimen was unrecognizable in part because it was arched into that back-bending inside-out broken wheel position. And partially because the long taper of its body was, well, not utterly smooth, because I could see wounds and stubs along its length, but shorn. Shorn of tendrils, wings, or fins. And shorn as well of the long, symmetrical appendages they used as manipulators.

I couldn’t imagine that a dead Ativahika would ever be considered a good sign. I wish I could say that, staring at that terrible thing, I had a premonition. But if I had had a premonition of what it really portended, I would have thrown my veto and turned that ship around right that very second and gone to find Judiciary. No matter what it cost us. No matter how long it took.

All the evidence would likely have been gone by the time we got back. And that bothers me a little, and it would have bothered the me in the alternate timestream where I made more cautious choices. Given what I eventually learned, I guess it wouldn’t have been the end of it anyway. There would have been another avenue to get to us. And in any case, time is a river that only flows one way.

It feels… odd to be telling this story. It’s just me recording in senso, journaling. I’ve kept ayatana logs, like any crew member does. But it’s never been something I thought anybody else might hear, except maybe a review board, and now… now I don’t know who I’m talking to.

But my log might turn out to be important: a historical document or evidence in a hearing or even an inquest and trial. So now I’m thinking about, well, who am I talking to? Because I’m not just talking to myself anymore.

I’m talking to a court panel, maybe. A judge and a couple of AIs and some people from various syster species who’ve come up in the service lottery this an. Or maybe I’m talking to the crew of another salvage tug, because I’m dead and what you have left is this voice record, not even an ayatana. Or maybe I’m talking to a historian, some archinformist who’s unearthed this from a forgotten storage crystal.

Or maybe you’re a pirate.

In which case I hope you choke on what I have to say.

“What could cause that?” Connla asked.

You could almost hear Singer shaking the head he didn’t have. “Connla, I do not know. Its trajectory is interesting, however. It seems to be on an elongated orbit around the space-time scar that we came here to investigate.”

“White scars aren’t supposed to have gravity,” Connla said.

“No,” Singer agreed. “They aren’t.”

“How’s the bubble?” I asked.

From somewhere behind me, the scuff of Connla turning. He was no more than a glimpse of shiny black ponytail in the reflective casement at the window’s edge. “Holding.”

“Do you want to investigate?”

Singer did. I admit, I was curious myself. But it seemed like an unnecessary risk, and chasing the corpse down on EM would take time.

And we were here with a job to do.

I pushed back from the window, went to my post, and dipped fingertips into my interface. The unspace around the salvage tug flooded my nervous system with colors, tastes, smells. It tipped and whirled, my sense of balance engaging as well. The white bubble—our own private little artificially generated reality—kept the universal constants in order so our neurons kept firing and our lungs kept lung-ing, and that was a good thing. Once we found the scar and went into it, we wouldn’t be able to see or sense a damned thing beyond it. A border where the laws of physics changed plays hob with the electromagnetic spectrum.

So we crept toward the wormhole scar.

The scar wasn’t exactly visible. It was gravitational, like a slit in the universe with a bit less mass than the areas around it. Galaxies are surrounded—permeated—by a halo of dark gravity. Teflon-coated reality, as it were: stuff we can’t interact with, can’t see, can’t sense… except it has mass. Maybe. In any case, it generates gravity. Or curvatures in space-time. Or… it amounts to what it amounts to.

So we were swinging our mass detectors around, scanning for a ripple, of sorts, in the heaviness of space. A spot that would appear as if someone had teased a magnet along a pile of iron filings and drawn them all to one side or the other, so they heaped in two ridges and the center became a valley. There was dark gravity here, in the space between the stars, as well as around us, intertwined with the stuff of the Milky Way. The stuff was like spun sugar stretched between sticky fingers, if the galaxy were a snacking toddler.