Toward us.
“Whoa,” I said, my pulse accelerating. “Singer, did you do that?”
“I was just about to ask you the same thing. What did you do?”
“I don’t know!”
“Well, keep doing it! It’s working!”
The object rose out of the Well like a freight elevator, its bubble a little itch or snag in my Koregoi awareness. It was slow, to start. Painfully slow, on a scale where even Singer’s actuarial expectancy of conscious existence might not be enough to let him see its journey ended.
For a while, I wondered if it would have the capability—or the fuel—to fold space-time fast and hard enough to pull itself out of something like the Well. As far as I knew, this was a thing that had never been attempted. When we had access to a real library, I should check out if anybody had probed these depths with remote drones, or if we were making scientific history here.
I’d anchored myself by my afthands to a rail and was watching with tight breath, hunger and tiredness forgotten—or tuned out by Singer, which was nearly the same. The anomaly accelerated, hoving toward us, not actually moving itself because the space inside its white bubble was stationary. But the space around the white bubble was scrunching up before and unscrunching behind like an inchworm on amphetamines.
Pretty soon, it was coming so fast I could barely believe it. I tried not to think too hard about the fact that the Koregoi senso was apparently letting me feel what was happening light-minutes away at an instantaneous rate of return. These ancestor-systers could manipulate space-time in such a way as to create localized, artificial gravity. What was a little spooky action at a distance to them?
The black hole time dilation kept being obvious, and that made me re-realize just how fast the anomaly had to be moving, because… well, it was way down in the Well, and from its perspective, we were living very fast indeed right now in our perch on the rim.
Singer eventually kicked me out of my own senso and forced me to eat something and have a nap. He kept working on trying to communicate with the ship. Apparently he didn’t need me awake for that, so I stayed out of his way.
Space is big, and even at ludicrous rates of speed, crossing chunks of it takes a long time.
While the Koregoi artifact swam its way to the surface against the current of space-time, the Synarche ships closed on us. We held a brief conference about what to do when they got there.
“Turn me over,” Singer said definitively. “Explain everything, ask them to corroborate with Goodlaw Cheeirilaq, bask in the glory of having retrieved what appears for the time being to be a fully functional Koregoi ship, and see if you can somehow get in on the study team.”
“I’m not an academic,” Connla said. “I’ll have to find a gig.”
I held my tongue. I wished I could have managed to be more excited about the unprecedented thing we’d discovered. But I didn’t want to be an academic. I really didn’t want to be an experimental subject.
And I didn’t want to be stuck in the crowded Core.
But I also really didn’t think they’d be letting me just wander off anywhere with a hide full of Koregoi tech that could sense dark gravity, create artificial gravity, and manipulate the curves of space-time. I was going to get drafted into Synarche service for a term of at least a few ans as soon as they got here, right alongside Singer.
Well, at least maybe we’d get to stay in touch, if that happened.
So I was stuck, and I couldn’t expect Connla to be stuck with me. He was too good of a pilot to sit down a well.
Even the big one.
With a sense of rising futility and entrapment, I wondered what we were going to do with the cats. I didn’t want to split them up, but the idea of losing both of them crushed me, and I couldn’t ask Connla to make that sacrifice either.
I petted Mephistopheles’s patchworky ears and bumped a load of GABA analogues in order to keep from bursting into tears. If I got to stay with Singer, Connla should get Mephistopheles and Bushyasta. It was only fair.
The band is breaking up, I thought, and laughed a little at my own melodramatics, which was a good sign the tuning was kicking in. All things end, but this had been a healthy and happy part of my life, much better than the bit before.
Good for me.
Now that I was calmer, I realized that my anxiety had come from some ancestral part of my brain that was convinced that whatever came next would be entirely and irreparably awful, and I’d probably wind up wounded and emotionally shattered again before it was through. Also, what I was losing was so good. I’d found what I wanted, and now I had to give it up.
That sucked like a singularity.
I wanted to run back to a clade and not have to make any choices again ever. I wanted to run for the Big Empty and never come back. I wanted to stop having to decide things.
It was just change panic. Change panic is awful.
Transitions suck.
Apprehension rooted in traumatic response, it turns out, doesn’t help with that.
Well, I wasn’t going to let them stick me on a planet, that was for sure. Or even a big station, if I could help it. I was staying where I didn’t have to walk, because I wasn’t going through adaptive surgery again.
Something big was getting close. I brought myself forcefully back from the depths of self-examination, frightened and startled for a moment because my focus had been so far away. It was the white bubble that contained the Koregoi ship, unless we were wrong about everything. (Possibly it was a killer robot from the depths of time that would eat us all and then consume the galaxy. Possibly. That had been one of Connla’s suggestions when we were discussing it earlier, probably tongue in cheek, but I wouldn’t want to be the one to tell him I’d discounted his opinion and then have it turn out to, in fact, be a killer robot from the depths of time.)
I couldn’t see it with my eyes, of course; but the archaeological senso told me where it was, and I could feel the ripples and eddies its movement left in the already gravity-stressed fabric of space-time as if somebody were dragging an anchor out of a whirlpool.
It crested—and stopped.
I held my breath as I “watched” it breach from the depths of the Saga-star, and felt my doom impending. I hadn’t been this chained to a path I had no control over since I got out of my clade.
Left to my own devices I would have bolted, Singer, Connla, cats and all. Maybe this was why people went pirate.
I had too many ethics, and too much a sense of my obligations as a citizen, to do it. Anyway, Singer wouldn’t have heard of it, so I didn’t even bring it up.
This is what we call “being socially aware.”
“Well,” I said. “There it is.”
“Sure is,” Singer agreed. “Can you get it into normal space remotely?”
“Do we want to?” I waved vaguely at the screens that showed the progress of our incoming entourage of Synarche vessels. “Everybody will see it, if I do.”
“We weren’t planning on hiding it.” Singer believes in following the rules.
Alas.
“Besides,” he said, “one white space spacewalk is enough for this lifetime. I would be remiss to allow you to attempt that again.”
“Aw,” Connla said. “She got away with it.”
I punched him on the arm companionably, but didn’t feel up to arguing with Singer when my interior landscape was bubbling away with subterranean volcanic activity. “I’ll try.”