Not a syster? I asked. I mean, there were the Ativahikas, which weren’t exactly a syster, not really talking to the rest of us much. And not having a white space drive so much as being a white space drive… .
Suddenly, all the glittering particles gliding gracefully and harmlessly between the cells of my epidermis seemed to ferociously itch. I’m not a praying sentient, but at that moment, I felt such a horrible black hole of implication implode in my belly that I almost doubled over in pain. Cheeirilaq put a manipulator on my shoulder to steady me.
That’s why you recognize the tattoos, I said.
The particles are derived from the sensory organs of Ativahikas. They are not widely known; in fact, their existence is kept a secret outside of law enforcement circles. They are believed to be a form of Koregoi technology that was given to or traded for or somehow imbued into the Ativahika species in a time of great antiquity. In combination with certain innate abilities of the Ativahikas, they allow the species to—
I interrupted. —to traverse space-time as if they were living starships. And somebody is stealing these particles, by murdering Ativahikas. And I have a bit of this technology embedded in me.
I’m sorry, Cheeirilaq stridulated, reminding me that the rest of the conversation had been carried out in utter silence.
We stopped before the aquaculture observation windows.
I am glad, the Goodlaw continued, that you did not acquiesce to this anathema knowing its origin.
I’m a walking war crime.
Yes.
The dodecapod was hard at work when we paused. It had a combined head and body about a meter across. It didn’t speak to us, seeming involved in its labors, but as we paused it raised six of its twelve legs in a cheery wave, flashing ripples of electric blue and silver across its normally sedate dark red surface. Maybe it recognized us; apparently we were both around enough, and we’d been waiting for clearance to leave for more than two dia. Also, dodecapods and humans have kind of a long-term friendly relationship. I don’t remember all the details, but we found them before they invented spaceflight—spaceflight is a rough invention for aquatic species, for a number of obvious reasons, though they’re great astronauts once somebody gets them up here, and the noncompressibility of water means they’re often really good at remaining functional in erratic gs—and before the Synarche brought us in as systers, but after we’d developed crude rightminding technology.
So our species are, in the parlance of the Synarche, elder systers to one another.
Cheeirilaq and I both waved back.
Does Habren know?
Cheeirilaq’s wing coverts buzzed. That seemed more like a shrug than a yes, given what I also picked up through the senso.
Who. Who did this to me?
They are Jothari. The Synarche’s greatest tragedy. But I think it was Terran pirates who murdered their crew and stole their ship and… cargo. Such a wave of distaste that I could feel it through the senso, despite our incompatible neurologies.
The name meant nothing to me.
What do you mean, the Synarche’s greatest tragedy? We don’t have tragedies anymore.
Well, Cheeirilaq said, perhaps we still did, a long time ago.
And it proceeded to tell me the history of how the Synarche learned to be a patient suitor, because it turns out that making mistakes is how we grow up, whether we’re a multispecies alien utopia, or just some dude screwing up their first romance beyond believability.
This is what I learned: early on, when the Synarche was new, it was not a Synarche yet at all, but a Galactic Parliamentary Democracy—and grandiosely so named, because in those diar it consisted of five or six of the foundation systers and perhaps a dozen systems. The short version of a very long and ugly story is that by the time the Galactic Parliamentary Democracy encountered the Jothari, the Jothari were working on establishing a smaller but still thriving interstellar community of their own. They’d come of age in one of the sparser and darker arms of the Milky Way—not unlike my own species, as it happened, so I feel a certain sympathy for this—and had never seen any evidence of sentient life until a Parliamentary ship dropped out of white space over their homeworld, ascertained that they were a spacefaring species, and opened communications in as friendly a manner as possible, considering a language gap.
I mean, when you show up in orbit over somebody else’s inhabited planet, not dropping a rock on it or tossing your bow wave in their direction is, in itself, a reasonable assurance of goodwill, but not everybody understands that—and there is, I suppose, the possibility that you might want a quickly habitable planet afterward.
Anyway, the Jothari had managed to reach a couple-three of their closest neighbor systems, and had pretty good shipping and space-colonization efforts going on. Then the Galactic Parliamentary Democracy ship full of weirdos like my friend the Goodlaw showed up and opened communications. The Parliamentary crew was not met in a friendly fashion, but at least no shots were fired.
They drew back, and that was when they found out that the Jothari were navigating by harvesting Ativahikas, a species generally-accepted-as-sentient, who had a migratory path running through the core of Jothari space. The Synarche’s antecedents tried to intervene, leading to the beginnings of a war.
Through absolute blind bad luck, an antibiotic-resistant pandemic broke out among the Jothari worlds around then, and somewhere between 60 and 80 percent of their population died. They declared this an act of war on the part of the proto-Synarche, and came gunning.
There was a lot more of the proto-Synarche, and despite the Jothari superior navigation, the Synarche… wiped them out.
Not to the last being. But to the last world, leaving those that remained homeless. And not welcome in proto-Synarche space—if they would have considered coming near the government that had committed semi-involuntary genocide against them. So they made their way as best they could.
Maybe they have shadow colonies, Cheeirilaq said. Maybe they’ve gone as far out as Andromeda and possibly even made allies there. Though if they had, I’m not sure we’d still find them scavenging around the edges of Synarche space.
They’re not in the databases.
No. Well, you could find them. They’re not expunged. Just deemphasized. And it’s possible the archinformists used keywords that were less than helpful to the neophyte to archive and classify the data.
Possible. Sure. And Habren doesn’t want me to know about them?
[Habren’s species] was one of the ones involved in the initial mistake. It gave me its version of Habren’s species name, which was as made-up as the human version, the original being in plant pheromones. They’re culturally very ashamed. That was about the time people started looking for a better system of government, it turns out. My people have a saying, that every civilization is founded in a terrible crime.
There didn’t seem to be much I could say to that. Even given my limited knowledge of the vast span of Terran history, terrible crimes seemed terribly commonplace, and didn’t usually lead to enlightenment.
The swirling, sinking sensation in my gut was grief, and I let myself feel it, along with the gratitude for what the Synarche was. Imperfect, surely; infested with its own brands of sophipathology and problematic social constructs. Walking a fine and wavering balance between the conformity and regulation necessary for social cohesiveness and the observance of individual freedoms within reason.