Elizabeth Bear
ANCESTRAL NIGHT
This book is for Jon Singer.
LOW-TIDE
♦ ♦ ♦
CHAPTER 1
THE BOAT DIDN’T HAVE A name.
He wasn’t deemed significant enough to need a name by the authorities and registries that govern such things. He had a registration number—657-2929-04, Human/Terra—and he had a class, salvage tug, but he didn’t have a name.
Officially.
We called him Singer. If Singer had an opinion on the issue, he’d never registered it—but he never complained. Singer was the shipmind as well as the ship—or at least, he inhabited the ship’s virtual spaces the same way we inhabited the physical ones—but my partner Connla and I didn’t own him. You can’t own a sentience in civilized space.
Singer was a sliver of a thing suspended electromagnetically at the center of a quicksilver loop as thin in cross section as an old-fashioned wedding band, but a hundred and fifty meters across the diameter and ten meters from edge to edge. In any meaningful gravity, the ring would have crumpled and sagged like a curl of wax arched over the candleflame. But here in space, reinforced with electromagnetic supports, it spanned the horizon of the viewport in a clean arc.
I held on to a rail with one afthand, lazily comfortable as I watched the light sliding in Doppler-watered bands across the silver surface of the white coils. The concentrated colors of the ring moved across a background that looked like a dilute version of the same pattern, as the action of the white drive changed what would have been a gorgeous starfield into twisting blue and red light that glided like the colors on heated titanium.
Those ripples of light were messages written in physics and perception. The information they offered would have seemed cryptic to most people. They would have seemed cryptic to me, twenty ans ago when I was but a wee slip of a person freshly skinned out and free of the clade I grew up in, Nyumba Yangu Haina Mlango. But I had a lot of practice reading their frequency and patterns now. Singer was… well, slowing wasn’t exactly the right word, but it would do. We were, to coin a phrase, getting there.
Singer couldn’t navigate in white space. He could only follow the course planned and programmed beforehand, coasting like a surfer on a wave of space contracting before him and stretching out behind. He—we—were not even, technically speaking, moving, let alone moving particularly fast. The universe was just rearranging itself around us, invisible to those outside the bubble of the white field.
Soon we would fold ourselves out of white space and into the normal universe. We were looking for a scar in space-time, the tiny ripple of radiation left by the passage of a ship whose course hadn’t been tracked by any authority, and so when it had been lost, its loss had gone unnoticed for—well, nobody could actually say how long. We were going there on purpose, and we planned to stay a while. Because somewhere down that Alcubierre-White rabbit hole in space-time there was—or at least had been—a ship. A lost ship.
A misplaced one, anyway. We’d taken on obligation for an information broker who provided us with scans and imaging they’d obtained from the captain who had noticed the anomaly. They’d also provided the anomaly’s coordinates.
The coordinates we’d bid on were off the beaten path, perpendicular by a good distance from the inhabited and regularly traveled space lanes of the Milky Way. But we’d been out this far before, and space was vast. Ships still got lost now and then, but they were usually better tracked these diar, and in the centuries since the white drive had turned space from an empty, intractable void permeated by loneliness and existential dread into a teeming, boisterous, and mostly peaceful community of species… much of the older salvage in the plane of the Milky Way had been picked clean.
Bright ripples across the darkness narrowed, sharpened, resolved into bands, then blurs, then points of light. We fell into normal space and began to close the gap on our EMP engines. Through Singer’s senso, I got a feel for the scar.
It was a big one, and it looked fresh, which meant that the odds of the unlucky vessel that had caused it still being in there were pretty good. That would be nice, because our last two claims had come up empty, and the larder was a little bare. We hadn’t even gotten any wreck-driving tourist contracts recently, which were risky—especially the ones involving close approach to an event horizon—but secretly a lot of fun.
Connla liked them even more than I did.
“I wish I knew what the ship that found this thing was doing way the hell out here. There’s literally nothing for light-ans in any direction.” Connla, speaking to me through senso. He was up in the control cabin. It was supposed to be my rest shift. Sometimes, despite all the rightminding I can tolerate, I still have nightmares.
I answered, “If I had a nasty, suspicious mind…”
“Yeah,” Connla said. “Pirates. Me too.”
“You know they don’t like being called pirates,” Singer joked.
“Freeloaders.” Connla came from a world called Spartacus, notorious for its atavistic culture. One reason it was that way was because it sat so close to Freeport strongholds. Border brushfires and the constant threat of raids and one’s shipping being picked off contributed to a martial culture. And I wasn’t supposed to know this, but Connla had survived a pirate raid on an asteroid settlement when he was a child.
I frowned at the scar. Singer’s senses were designed for space, and his readouts told me that the scar was fresh. If there was a ship in there, and it was intact, and we could bring it home—depending on what it was—this whole trip would be worthwhile. We had an obligation to the Synarche that needed to be met, one way or another. We were spending resources to be here; resources the Synarche would want recouped and, ideally, built upon. The prize ship and its cargo were where that replacement value would come from.
“It’ll be a smuggler,” Connla said dourly.
A bad outcome for our obligation if it was. Contraband was illegal goods or stolen art. Everything else a civilized galactic Synarche required was so easy to make, or ship, that there was no percentage in dodging around customs. If they were smuggling art, there might be forgiven obligations for recovering lost cultural treasures.
There also might not.
A pirate would be even more useless to us, beyond any value there might be in the hull. Some find the Galactic Synarche suffocating. And I have a healthy sympathy for the whole avoiding-suffocation thing. But there’s asserting a reasonable individuality in the face of social norms, and then there’s piracy and murder as an economic model.