It was conceivable—conceivable, and perhaps even plausible—that the very Ativahika to whom I was speaking right this very instant was old enough in its own person to remember our forerunners. I wished I had the opportunity to ask it and find out. But right now, somehow, didn’t seem to be the appropriate time for it.
Maybe some other occasion would present itself, when I wasn’t being interrogated on suspicion of capital crimes.
About that, the ancient one said.
Not words. Not colloquial language, such as I had used. But a sense of it echoing the sentiment I’d just expressed, and reinforcing it.
Please. Tell me more.
So.
I did.
I told it that we had followed ancient roadmarks to the mothballed vessel we were now in, and I told it that before its people had managed to drag us down out of white space, we had been out of control, on autopilot, and that the shipmind and I had been working to hack—or unhack!—the ship to regain control of her. I did not ask it how the hell it and its species-mates had managed to locate us in white space, of all the impossible tricks, nor how they had managed to contact, grapple, and stop us, hauling us back into the unfolded world. If that was what, indeed, had happened.
I did not tell it specifically that Farweather had been involved in the death of the Ativahika we’d found orbiting the Jothari factory ship, or that she’d murdered the Jothari crew. I did not tell it that she was responsible for our previous trajectory, because that would have resulted in physical problems for her, and perhaps physical and definitely ethical problems for me. I didn’t mention her at all.
It turned out I needn’t have wasted my time playing liar-by-omission, anyway, because apparently the Ativahika already knew more about Farweather than they’d been letting on. As I found out when the ancient one said to me, And would you send your shipmate to face our justice? The one like you, not the shipmind.
“I won’t argue that she doesn’t deserve whatever justice you have in mind for her,” I said. “But what do you mean by ‘send’ her?”
Its catfishy face hung against a night scattered with only a few dim stars. Tendrils and fronds writhed around a long, lipless mouth designed to gnaw water and minerals from space debris, under conditions where water was a stone. It was so close beside our motionless ship that I could have touched it, or nearly, if there had not been windows and the hull in the way. I could not take it all in at once. I could glance at an eye, the fronds, the smoothly shaded aquamarine skin. But it was too big and too close for me to see it as all of a thing.
We can crush your ship, if you prefer.
Not exactly my ship, but there are times to split hairs. And times to do something else, instead.
“I know that,” I said. My stomach felt like it was boiling.
And yet you protect that creature.
I didn’t have an answer. “I don’t want to protect her, exactly. She doesn’t need or want my protection, I imagine. But I don’t want to be complicit in her death.”
Do you think it—she—would protect you?
I felt it correcting itself, trying to understand the concepts I was expressing and searching its own referents for an analogy. I don’t think it had any idea what he or she or it referred to. Just that they were arbitrary categories of some kind that were important to me, for whatever reason, so it would try to abide by them.
“No,” I said. “Actually, I’m confident that she’d hang me out a window the second you asked, if our positions were reversed.”
You did not lie for it.
“I did not.” I guess it could tell if I was being truthful, after all.
It’s always a good idea to play it safe when you can. Well, unless you’re Connla. He has—had?—a knack for getting away with things.
Hope was a terrible thing, I reminded myself. I could not afford to feel it.
You did not volunteer information either.
“I was pretty sure that if I did tell you—I mean, you, the Ativahika—everything I knew about Farweather, well. You lot would probably insist on me dragging her to an airlock and turning her over to you, space suit or no space suit, and I didn’t really want to be a party to that.”
Why does it not speak for itself?
I looked over at Farweather. Her eyes were dilated, and she had dropped down to a crouch, resting her palms against the deck.
I said, “Perhaps she does not know what to say.”
There was a fairly long silence then. Well, obviously, the Ativahika’s entire part of the conversation was silent because it was in my head. But it stopped… speaking? Sending impressions? And I fell still.
Inside the ship I could hear the tick of metal, the sounds that temperature control and life support made, the shuffle of Farweather’s foot. Outside there was silence, as there is and has been and always should be. The perfect silence of the spheres.
I wanted her punished. But I didn’t think it was my place to be judge and jury and all of Justice, to pass sentence on her and hand her over to alien laws. It was petty and unworthy of me, but I wished suddenly that she would just turn herself over to them and save me all the bother and the damned wrestling with my damned ethics.
And… that also would have involved me dragging her to the airlock, and I was trying to avoid killing anybody todia. Out of cowardice or queasiness, probably, because it wasn’t as if she didn’t deserve a good airlocking, and my fox was still turned off, but I still couldn’t quite bring myself to frog-march her down there and kick her out the door into space for the Ativahika to do whatever Ativahika do to alien murderers.
I was a damned piece of work my own self, wasn’t I?
The ancient one had been silent for a long time, and I was finding it really unsettling. My palms itched. I couldn’t hear Farweather shifting anymore, or even breathing, but I also hadn’t heard her run out or collapse to the floor and Singer hadn’t said anything to warn me, so I figured she was still frozen in the same place. There was enough light outside now—the bioluminescence of the Ativahika—that picking out her reflection behind me had gotten challenging.
Well, it wouldn’t be the first time I had counted on Singer to watch my back.
You will seek your own kind’s justice upon her.
Now I really wanted to glance over at her. To wink, as if to reassure her. But I knew that wink would be a lie, and I knew the Ativahika would know it.
It’s curiously impossible to contemplate an outright lie, even to a third party, with a wise, weird face of a truth-detecting alien hanging over you.
I sighed in self-disgust and said, “I am. I mean, I am doing that. As much as is in my power. Yes.”
Singer was so quiet I wondered if he’d crashed. I heard Farweather’s intake of breath, though. Fight-or-flight reflex, preparing herself to run.
Then you have made pact with us. See that this justice is served, and with you we have no further quarrel.
“You’re just going to let us go?”
It didn’t echo my sigh, of course, since its respiration was an entirely internal exchange between it and its blue-green algae symbiotes. But I still got a sense of parental weariness across our connection. You and the other intelligence on your ship are innocent. I will not destroy two innocents to punish one guilty one. That would not be justice. That would merely be blood.