“I bet the person who sold us that intel about the Jothari ship was working for Habren, or these pirates,” I said. “This Farweather person said a few things that made me think we were expected. I think we were brought out here on purpose.”
Singer said, “They think we have information. They wanted us—Haimey?—alive and possibly cooperative. And they wanted that before they knew Haimey had the Koregoi senso on board.”
“That’s not creepy,” Connla said.
“Okay,” I said. “So what do we know that we don’t know we know?”
“More to the point,” Connla said, “what does the parasite know?”
CHAPTER 10
IT’S NOT LIKE THE DAMNED thing speaks English!” I fumed, the third time Connla looked over at me worriedly. I understood—I got it! The pirates could—somehow—track us. Probably through the parasite, because it was the only superscience we had floating around, and I didn’t know of any more conventional means by which it could have been accomplished. More to the point, Singer didn’t know about any, and he had better data banks than I did.
But I couldn’t seem to track the pirates in return. Not over this distance. And not to put too fine a point on it, but we didn’t know where we were going or what to do next. And until we figured it out, we had the choice of burning irreplaceable fuel going in what might turn out to be a wrong direction; trying to outrun the news that we’d gone rogue that was no doubt even now propagating, packet by packet, across the galaxy; or throwing in the towel, heading for the Core, turning ourselves in, and trying to explain away the illegal and dangerous actions we’d taken by convincing the Synarche that their local government at Downthehatch was a corrupted sector. We couldn’t drop out of white space and wait until we came up with a plan, despite our very adequate stock of consumables, because there was that chance that the pirates could track us, and if we stood still there was the chance they might catch us.
Well. Meditating worked the last time.
What the hell, it might work again.
I don’t want to get all woo about it, because it didn’t feel like that at all. And I’ve never been big into the Eightfold Path or any of that religious stuff—Connla dabbled with it for a while, but I think that was mostly a reaction to where he grew up, and he eventually dropped all the Buddha and went for “loveable” rogue, instead.
Honestly, Right Speech and its prohibition on filling the air with needless chattering would probably be the hardest one for me. Also, I like the occasional curse word. But putting yourself into a meditative state, that’s useful, and it turns out that even before tuning and rightminding, people knew a little bit about how to hack their neurochemistry.
I settled myself in a convenient corner of the common cabin, folded myself into a comfortably fetal position, and sent myself into my breath. I’d been able to feel the pirate the last time I did this; maybe I could at least get a fix on her position again. Maybe if I calmed myself and observed the sensations from the parasite for a while, it would even tell me something I didn’t already know.
I was out of other ideas, anyway.
It took a few moments to find my breath, but once I did I settled into the comfortable no-space inside myself pretty rapidly. As before, concentrating made the sensations of the parasite in my body stand out more strongly—not just as new, or alien, but as a sense I hadn’t previously known I had. Humans were pretty sense-poor, even among Terran species, but I imagined that my new facility was not unlike those species who were able to navigate by sensing a planet’s magnetosphere, or who had some kind of built-in echolocation.
It’s pretty common to visualize space-time via a wireframe projection, which is useful because it makes the concept of a “gravity well” and so forth intuitively obvious. If you’re a planetary, it’s like visualizing the landscape’s inclines via a topographic map. Of course, it’s also deceptive, for a couple of reasons.
The first is that space-time (as we sense-limited humans perceive it) is neither two-dimensional nor static, but four-dimensional, and one of those dimensions is imperceptible to us except that it’s what keeps everything from happening at once. The other is that it’s not a wireframe, any more than Olympus Mons is a series of lines drawn at varying intervals to one another. So what I was perceiving was probably not at all like what most people would be visualizing, any more than… any more than George Eliot’s narrative of Middlemarch, enormous and sprawling and omniscient as it is, can accurately represent the breadth and depth of the fictional world that it implies in its interstices, as babies are revealed to have been conceived, carried, and born in an aside or two; as marriages and wedding journeys occur while our attention is with someone else in some other state of domestic crisis.
My awareness of what for lack of a better analogy I will call the shape of space-time started to permeate me as I floated and felt. As if my nerve endings did not end with my skin; as if I were feeling a great, transparent, but still defined real matrix that I was embedded in but could move through, more or less freely. Gravity wells like cliffs you could fall down from any angle, or like great down-welling currents—easy to sense, and instinctively I knew they were dangerous and I should stay clear. I felt as if I had been navigating a vast space by touch alone, groping in the darkness, and suddenly I could see.
And yet somehow all that information came through a sense of patterns of weight not so much on as in my skin. The parasite, through whatever alien means, was training my brain to accept its input as sensory data and perceive it as this matrix I was examining now.
Neuroplasticity is a wonderful thing.
But I still had to stop and look, I supposed, which was why the meditation was useful. There was a lot of competing sensory input, and my brain tended to preferentially sort that from the senses it was used to interpreting as more important and more immediately relevant. So I had a selective attention problem: I could pay attention to what my eyes and ears and skin and tongue and inner ear and whatnot told me, or I could pay attention to my… space sonar, which I badly needed a better name for.
I bet dolphins and dodecapods don’t have this problem.
Well, they might, if you strapped corrective lenses onto their eyes and stuck them in a rover vehicle optimized to be operated by flippers.
So there was the world inside my skin, space in all its folds and sweeps and tangles and cliffs and swells, immense and moving and utterly incomprehensible, and even as I tuned myself into it I spiked a surge of panic at how big everything was. It was the same atavistic emotion our ancestors felt, I imagined, in their tiny boats in the middle of a vast and changing sea with no land in sight and nothing in any direction to tell them which way to go, or even which way they were going, because the world was moving around them and moving them around even as in their own perspective they were staying still.
I drew a deep breath and told myself that they had the same thing I had.
We both had the stars.
Slowly, I began to build a sense of where I was in this strange and gigantic spread of information, and what certain elements of it might mean. There was the Core, I was certain—that increasing, variegated slope that ended in a stunning drop, which suggested to me that that was a place from which even information could not escape. That’s the textbook definition of a certain kind of space-time phenomenon, and it seemed to be the right spot for the Saga-star.