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.