Ancestral Night

Book : White Space

by Elizabeth Bear

Genres: Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Alien Contact; Space Opera

Synopsis

Cutting edge ideas and amazing characters in an SF novel that announces the arrival of multi-award winning Elizabeth Bear to the Gollancz list

A space salvager and her partner make the discovery of a lifetime that just might change the universe in this wild, big-ideas space opera from multi award-winning author Elizabeth Bear.

Haimey Dz thinks she knows what she wants.
She thinks she knows who she is.
She is wrong.

A routine salvage mission uncovers evidence of a terrible crime and relics of a powerful ancient technology, just as Haimey and her small crew run afoul of pirates at the outer limits of the Milky Way and find themselves both on the run, and in possession of ancient, universe-changing technology.
When the authorities prove corrupt, it becomes clear that Haimey is the only one who can protect her galaxy-spanning civilisation from its potential power - and from the revolutionaries who want to use it to seed terror and war. But doing so will take her from the event horizon of the super-massive black hole at the galaxy's core to the infinite, empty spaces at its edge. Along the way, she'll have to uncover the secrets of ancient intelligences lost to time as well as her own lost secrets, which she will wish had remained hidden from her forever . . .

Energetic and electrifying, Ancestral Night is a dazzling new space opera, sure to delight fans of Alastair Reynolds, Iain M. Banks, and Peter F. Hamilton.

(p) Orion Publishing Group 2019

Release date: March 5, 2019

Publisher: Gallery / Saga Press

Print pages: 493

Sample

Ancestral Night 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.

A hull could bring us some recovery credit. If it were in decent shape. Which pirate ships rarely were. But it wouldn’t get us much else, because any cargo would likely be resources that, while valuable to those of us living in space within the Synarche, weren’t valuable enough to go ferreting around in space-time pockets after.

“Maybe it’ll be a Wake-Seeker,” I sent, cheerfully. Those who followed the Path of the Unfinished Work were always grateful for news of the fate of missing brethren. Even if, as they say, the authentic experience is an illusion.

We were both really hoping that we might find a passenger vessel, commercial or private, that had wandered off course and gotten lost with no one the wiser as to its location. Those often offered finder’s credit in the form of resource allocation validations to the salvager who retrieved them, both from the shipping line, the owners of registry of any cargo, and the families or clades of any passengers. And if there was unregistered cargo, that could be value along with the hull.

Best of all were the packet vessels, which were full of information. And the ancient prizes from early exploration—by any race—that were treasure troves of archaeological data. That would be worth a few RAVs above the cost of the mission.

I didn’t even bother to consider the possibility that the hulk could be an ancient ship from a time long before that remembered by humans, or even any of the older syster species. I’d heard about Koregoi ships with salvageable tech. I’d never encountered one. Or even encountered anyone who admitted they had. But wouldn’t it be nice . . . ?

Well, that wouldn’t be behind a fresh scar, anyway. So honestly I was just black-sky diadreaming, indulging myself in fantasies of untold wealth. Or of at least buying Singer out of copyright so he would own his own code.

I was still on edge, and now it was too close to contact for me to bump my chems and get any restful sleep. Growing up clade—and a flirtation with chemical dependency after I broke free—had left me wary of the easy out, anyway, so I rarely thought of fixing the problem at the transmitter level when it was possible for me to ride it out.

When I remembered, or Singer nagged me into it, I always wondered why I hadn’t bumped earlier. Why I’d been so resistant in the first place. And except for a few permanent mental health adjustments, I always insisted on a limited adjustment that would wear off in half a dia or so.

Well, if people made sense, we’d be like Singer.

I turned away from the port. There would be a distraction of some sort in the command cabin, and I could caffeinate. Or bump, and tune for wakefulness since I’d missed the shuttle on rest.

I slid down the tunnel to the bridge headfirst, pushing off rungs in the tube with my fore- and afthands, avoiding bruising the lettuce and radishes growing along Singer’s living walls. The ship’s calico cats, Mephistopheles and Bushyasta, were floating in the tube, napping in a cuddle. Bushyasta, like the professional sleeper she was, had one set of claws hooked into the terry cloth of a grab loop. Mephistopheles was floating beside her, a red-and-white leg draped for an anchor over Bushyasta’s belly, her black-splashed head cuddled on a mottled flank. Well, at least somebody was getting some rest around here.

I glided the last meter or so—it wasn’t far: Singer really was a tiny bubble of a thing for frail warm meat to take to space in—and found myself gazing at the back of Connla’s head.

He’d anchored himself to a rail with his afthands, and his forehands were buried elbow-deep in the stuff of his console. His ponytail waved lazily behind him as he turned his head. I caught a glimpse of stubborn profile outlined against starfield and suppressed a smile.

He started to say something, coughed, and corrected himself. “Wouldn’t sleep?”

I could have argued—couldn’t—but I knew my unwillingness to tune my chem was opaque to Connla on an emotional level even when he professed to understand it intellectually. I thought he’d actually maybe mellow and mature a bit if he didn’t bump and tune so much to keep his responses calmed down to Spartacus’s stoic ideals. On the other hand, I’d have to put up with him finally experiencing adolescence, and that whole thing was such a mess I’d turned mine off when it happened. Well, okay, a little bit after it happened. Some people have to learn the hard way, and apparently I am one of them.

It was his brain and his chem and his business, so I just said, “We should have pulled a permit.”

“And let every other tug in the galaxy know where we were headed?”

“And have a chance of a rescue operation if we screw it up.” I settled near my console, floating with one afthand resting lightly against a rail, and watched out the forward windows as ripples of light gathered and spread.

Connla laughed. “You put on such a rebel act, but I keep hearing your crèche talking out of your mouth again and again. Anybody raised outside of a clade knows that it’s easier to get forgiveness than permission. Besides, a permit isn’t strictly legally necessary all the way out here. We’re not in anybody’s jurisdiction.”

He was transparent when he was baiting me. His own upbringing had left a few antisocial marks on him, but try to get him to admit that. If he hadn’t been such a good guy from the DNA on up, he would have been insufferable. And quite possibly socially dangerous.

“Forgiveness is not the same thing as retroactive consent, Connla. And the research shows that people are much more altruistic when they’re allowed to offer, instead of when something is demanded of them. There will be more red tape on the other end, this way.” He didn’t answer, so I said, “How much longer?”

“Ninety-seven seconds to the decel.”

My console felt cool and ready when I touched its carbonglas surface with my fingertips, just enough to stabilize, balance, and get a spherical perspective. I didn’t bury my hands in my console the way Connla had, but I wasn’t flying the bus.

Well, okay, Singer was flying the bus. But Connla was directing, and he needed to be plugged in to Singer’s full senso.

A wide arc of stars swung below and behind Singer like the frozen skirts of a flamenco dancer: the Milky Way, seen from . . . not exactly outside, but far to one edge, and an angle. Scuttling fingers tap-danced up my spine at the sight of home, so far away. Which was ridiculous, because it wasn’t home to me—Singer was. And we were in no more danger here than anywhere else in space. Maybe even a little less than if we were camped in some cluttered, long-inhabited system full of meteors, traffic that couldn’t follow a flight plan, and poorly mapped space junk.

It’s a territorial mammal thing, is all. There’s a sense of being long and far away from places you know your way around and have resources in that gets right up into the anxiety centers and made me feel lost and out of place.

We were off our turf, and my amygdala knew it.

Connla was cool and collected. I felt his calm through our link like a lapping sea. He didn’t look over at me to roll his eyes, a demonstration of self-control better than I’d have been able to manage. He’d didn’t have to tell me that he thought my resistance to tuning my mood was childish and irresponsible.

But he hadn’t grown up in a clade. He hadn’t escaped a clade. And the hypervigilance was my friend. His friend, too, if he’d ever admit it. Sure, it was uncomfortable. But that was a small price to pay for being ready. Getting caught by a disaster is bad enough. Getting caught by a disaster you didn’t expect adds that layer of humiliation and stunned goggle-eyed frozenness to the proceedings, and that doesn’t benefit you in the long run.

All of those memories were stored in my fox, and I would have shared the ayatana with him if he’d given me half an excuse. But he had never gotten past his childhood programming that feelings were sticky and somehow slightly revolting. So it was an element of our friendship that remained unexplored.

And thus my uneasy feeling could have just been my old friend Uneasy Feeling, dropping by to see how things were shaking. It could have been that territorial fear of not knowing where I was, and where to find food, shelter, water, and my tribe. But it never hurt to be on your guard.

Yep. Sleeping with one eye open, that’s me. People only think it’s ridiculous if they’ve never been caught napping by an enemy. And the truth of the universe is that anybody can turn out to be an enemy.

“Let’s keep the bubble up for now in case we have to move in a hurry,” I said.

Connla didn’t argue. He cleared his throat and said, “Singer, are you awake?”

“More awake than you are,” the ship replied. Most ships are she, for bigoted gender-essentialist historical reasons, and most of the rest see no reason to bother being gendered at all and call themselves they, but Singer liked a male identity.

He hadn’t always been a tugboat, I gathered. He had a bantering manner, which was just code, but when it came right down to it I was just code too, running on some kludged-together hardware.

He added, “What can I do for you?”

Singer was smart as hell, a born problem-solver if you told him what problem to solve for and gave him some parameters that he could extrapolate. But artificial personalities were intentionally limited in their self-direction and agency, for reasons that will be obvious to a cursory inquiry.

Those programmed shackles might be just as well, given the number of horror dramas about rogue personalities out there for one’s . . . enjoyment. And yet. I had a little too much personal experience with what it was like to be a happy worker, in agreement, without too much will to argue for myself or enough agency to set out in my own direction, to feel entirely comfortable with the solution. That was the real reason I came out here to the rim, where life was a constant struggle to validate resource expenditure. I needed my independence of thought, and so I scrapped for my dinner like some twentieth-century barbarian instead of enjoying the comfortable largesse of a Core world where I wouldn’t have to justify my resource footprint.

“Range to objective?” I kept all that out of my voice. That worry about feeling trapped was bugging me a lot todia, but I put the reasons for that as far out of mind as I could. I could have tuned that out, too, but I didn’t want to reach for that crutch too often. Anyway, dissociation is a great coping skill. It can keep you going and functional basically forever. The problems hit when it starts to break down, which is essentially as soon as you start to question your own detachment. Getting in touch with your emotions and experiences is overrated, if you ask me.

And before you tell me that it’s hypocritical of me to be concerned that Connla represses his emotions and then dissociate mine, it’s totally different when I do it. Totally, completely different. I’m doing it on purpose, and not as part of my childhood programming.

“A little less than an AU. I’m decelerating.”

I hung on to my bar and console grips as Connla began slowing us. He wouldn’t brake hard enough that I’d need my acceleration couch. But it was still a mite uncomfortable.

I bloody hate gravity.

We would have left white space at something considerably less than relativistic speeds—though still moving impossibly fast, by human standards. But the thing about space is that it’s still awfully big, even if one can travel very fast, and there isn’t a lot of friction in it to steady the system, so things respond violently to a gentle nudge or a slight shift in momentum.

No unaugmented human mind could perform the calculations necessary to control complicated multi-body problems. Dead reckoning worked better (the back of the mind is much better at figuring out complicated physics problems than the front, which is how the ball hits your hand when you stick it out in front of you), but somebody—something—like Singer was better still.

“Any other boats in the area?” I asked.

Connla said, “No,” at the same moment Singer said, “Not in regular space.”

And the ones in white space would be invisible and immaterial. If there were any. Until such time as they fell on our heads.

We spent a long time in decel. Now that I’d talked myself into tuning, I used this time more wisely: I webbed myself down and took a nap. I’m not sure what Connla did.

I awoke when Singer cheerfully said, “Coming up on our scab in space-time.” He had a light tenor voice, musical and animated, and he liked wordplay and coincidences and was endlessly fascinated by—well, anything. Human social dynamics. Lasers. Tea. Porcelain.

I breathed. There were no gs making me miserable, so I unwebbed and rose up from the couch.

We were alone out here. Nobody was going to come along and snatch our prize todia.

“Whoa,” Connla said. “What in nine gravity wells and an event horizon is that thing?”

Well, that was what I got for feeling cheerful.

It’s hard to get a sense of scale out here. You can hold out your hand and cover the entire bulk of a gas giant with a pinkie nail if it’s at enough distance—and there aren’t many referents to let you know if whatever you’re observing is near or far away.

So when my perceptions told me that something vast was drifting toward us, I was ready at first for it to be the size of my fist. Maybe a tangerine, quick-frozen by space and bobbing alongside the window, maybe hauled along inside our bubble from the inevitable ring of small litter that swarms around any space station.

But it wasn’t a tangerine. Whatever it was, was dark, so it faded into the background of the starscape. It was oily-seeming and iridescent, and it reflected the light of the Milky Way off a dark green surface. The tapered, irregular outline tumbled slowly, a long, majestic arc of curve like three-fourths of the rim of a gigantic, broken wheel. Space station, my mind provided. Catastrophically decompressed.

The part of my brain that recognizes patterns and assigns things to categories was leaning on its shovel catching a few zeds once again. The tumbling arc brought the weird object between us and the long arm of the Milky Way, and I recognized the silhouette, even convulsed into that strange arc, an instant before Singer identified it.

“It’s an Ativahika,” he said. “It appears to be dead.”

“They can die?” I asked, stunned, just as Connla burst out, “What the hell is it doing all the way out here?”

“I hope nothing killed it.” Anything that could take on an Ativahika—well, Singer was an unarmed tug, and fuel-efficient, but not what you would call a fast or maneuverable flyer. He was good at going in straight lines really cheaply while hauling enormous masses at a safe but respectable clip, though—which was why his white coils were so much bigger than he was. None better, if that was what you needed, and usually in our case it was.

I wondered if the Ativahikas would take it amiss if we salvaged one of their own, for purposes of returning the body to them. Or if they might be grateful. Of all the older syster races—assuming they were a syster race—they were in the running for the most inscrutable. I mean, they didn’t talk, at least as far as I knew. But they were generally accepted as sapient. Maybe it was just that they had never needed to communicate anything to something as tiny and fragile as a terrestrial-type species, when they had all of space to call their home.

? ? ?

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 H2O—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 H2O 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