Suddenly, I was falling away from her, as if acceleration had suddenly asserted itself and the ship I was in was gliding through space around me while I drifted, relatively stationary.
Have it your way, she said. This isn’t over.
She receded rapidly out of sight. I made contact with a bulkhead, which pressed against my back with reassuring force, and I almost started to relax until the bees, still tugging at my hair, began to sting.
I jerked awake in the dimness of my sleeping cubby. Bushyasta had climbed inside my net and was curled against my head, claws snagged in my hair, purring loudly in her sleep and kneading, which explained the pinpricks in my scalp.
“Dammit, cat,” I said groggily.
Singer must have been correcting course, because she drifted against her anchoring grip, tugging painfully.
“Ow,” I said, reaching up to push her away. “Ow, cat. Dammit!”
“Good morning, Haimey,” Singer said. “If you’re awake, we’re coming up on a beacon.”
Extricating—ExtriCATing—myself took a few minutes. Once I’d gotten Bushyasta out of my hair and lobbed her gently across quarters (she made no appearance of waking up during any of this; I’m sure she eats but damned if I know when) I pulled on some soft trousers and a tank top and made my way into the control cabin.
Connla lifted a hand in greeting without saying anything or shifting his attention. He seemed busy, so I drifted back into the galley and fixed myself some coffee.
The parasite told me where we were without my having to look at a chart, or even out a viewport. I could feel the slope of the galaxy as we glided down it, the Well tethering us despite our distance. We’d popped out of white space and were cruising on EM drive, describing a gentle arc toward what must be the beacon.
“In range,” Singer said. “Transferring data.”
I flinched inwardly. No take-backs, now. I drowned my emotions in a swig of coffee and didn’t say anything.
“Interesting,” Singer said a moment later. “Haimey, there’s a message here from Goodlaw Cheeirilaq, for you.”
The message in question was short, to the point, and encrypted. Fortunately, the encryption lock was coded to my DNA on file, which did two things: made it easy to read, and assured me that it probably had come from an official source. It was conceivable the Freeporters had a record of my DNA—I had been stabbed by a needle on a ship that wound up their prize, after all—and it was also conceivable that they had the DNA-datalock. But Singer didn’t think it terribly likely, and I trusted his judgment.
What Cheeirilaq told me was also reassuring, since I had decided to trust the Goodlaw; that my message had been received, and that Cheeirilaq was following us, and that it was in contact with Core authorities. I didn’t think it could make the kind of time we were making, not having the advantage of Koregoi senso. But it was still comforting to imagine that backup was on the way. Even if the backup in question was a giant low-gravity bug, it was better than nothing—and Cheeirilaq happened to be a giant low-gravity bug with the full force of law on its side. Even at the frontiers of space that was worth something, and among the packed worlds of the Core it was worth something more.
Planets are one of the reasons we all have to work so hard to get along out here, despite the systers of the Synarche comprising an insane array of metabolisms and morphologies. We have to find ways to work together, because the consequences of war are so horrific.
Planets are fragile, and easy to break. They are complicated systems that suffer greatly from relatively minor upsets that are completely trivial to create. And while they are robust in that they can often recover from many catastrophes, the catastrophes themselves are trivial to engineer, and the recovery may take geologic ages.
And it is possible to engineer unrecoverable catastrophes.
Planets are hostages to fortune. And the time is going to come for every species when they’ll want friends.
One thing about the Freeporters: they mostly don’t have a lot of colonies. Possibly not any, unless they’re well hidden. They get what they need and want that can’t be found in space by taking it, not growing or creating it.
They are exploitational, because of that. People tend to be more invested in protective social structures and collective, collaborative government when they feel themselves at risk. When they have something to lose. The Freeporters, not having the same level of investment, also don’t have the drive to engage. They take what they can get and sequester it. They are outside the system.
Farweather, of course, would tell me that I was under the thumb of oppressive government, duped into complicity with my own enslavement. And I admit, it’s tempting to consider what it would be like to skip out on responsibility, accountability, and interdependence and live only for yourself—but the idea of being surrounded by people with the same sophipathology makes it somewhat less appealing.
Actually, I wonder if Farweather would tell me that—or if I’m just imagining what Niyara would say, and projecting it onto the Sexy Pirate Type because trauma recapitulates itself.
CHAPTER 13
IT WAS A LONG TRIP. Connla learned some strategy game from Xxyxxyx and tried to get Singer interested in it. Singer continued with the hobby that had gotten him into draft trouble in the first place, which was playing in the official Synarche governance and conflict-resolution algorithm games and simulators. The so-called Global Dynamic Systems let him have a direct influence on government and policy through soft governance; there was oversight from the Core AIs and systers, but somebody a long time ago had figured out that people of almost all species tended to be more altruistic when allowed to set their own limits for sacrifice, and they’d also figured out that, statistically speaking, widesourced solutions to problems often worked out pretty well when you considered the average across responses, instead of the most popular response.
I repeat this because Singer mentioned it to me no less than five or six times, along with some long-winded stuff about “using the narrative to change framing around complex problems whose solutions are impeded by poor conceptualizing.”
He always wanted to talk to me about his hobbies when I was just getting into a good bit of my book. I am not sure how he could tell.
Maybe we should send him off to govern for a few ans. Running checks and oversight on people and doing what he loved to do all the time might just get him to shut up about it occasionally when he came back.
If he came back.
Which was, of course, the outcome I feared.
Life is change, I reminded myself, and scrolled open my copy of The Color Purple.
I finished any number of very long antique books over the time that followed. Most recently, Roots, and by the time we were approaching the Core I had started Two Winding Stairs. Travel got fussier as we made our way into the Core. Space here was cluttered, hops short, and traffic in lanes controlled by AIs in order to avoid inadvertent and tragic colocations. Because we were not following a filed and programmed plan, we had to avoid the lanes.
I think I read everything we had downloaded on that trip. I’d worked my way into the nonfiction, and some of Connla’s strategy books. I even picked up the little onionskin edition of Illuminatus! a couple of times and ran my thumb down the pages. They crinkled playfully. I put it back in my cubby, next to a chain a crèchemate gave me when I was little and a gingko leaf preserved in some kind of molded crystal. It was a keepsake of Terra, supposedly. I had read that in the early ans of the diaspora, people leaving the homeworld took a teaspoon of earth with them, but the practice fell out of favor eventually. Microbes, probably. And there were enough humans scattered through the galaxy by now that we would have excavated down to regolith if we’d kept up with it.