? ? ?
We patched the hole in the hull. That work went smoothly once we were back in normal space, and once we got our trajectory and v under control we dropped back into normal space right away. The good news was, we were nowhere near the prize vessel, the dead Ativahika, or the pirates who had done their best—or worst—to murder us, and there was no reasonable way of which I was aware for them to track us. The bad news was that we were nowhere near the prize vessel, the dead Ativahika, or the pirates—and there was no reasonable way of which I was aware for us to track us, either.
Which left us low on fuel, in a damaged ship, located we weren’t exactly sure where—albeit with dead reckoning, star charts, and a pretty good telescope. Fortunately, the last three things meant that Singer could figure out the location thing pretty quick. By human standards. By AI standards, he might have been chewing on his slide rule while sweat rolled down his brow for hours. There are only so many processing cycles to be had on a boat this size.
So we knew where we were, when he was done. And we also knew we didn’t have the fuel to get home and to slow down, once we got there. You can do some neat tricks with the Alcubierre-White drive, don’t get me wrong, including piling up space behind you and stretching it out before you to brake as well as piling it up before you and stretching it out behind to accelerate, which is why we can get up to speed at a real acceleration that would pulp any sentient except an AI—because the perceived accel can be negligible.
But that all takes energy. And energy comes from somewhere. It’s not, unfortunately, limitless.
Mephistopheles floated over to me and was begging for my tube of spaghetti in sauce, which was funny because she had a cute cat-trick of hooking one claw through your shirtsleeve so she could hang close to your face and be available while you were eating. Suddenly, the trick wasn’t working out for her because her claw kept bouncing off my isolation film, and she couldn’t quite figure out why.
“Cute.” Connla claims I taught it to her, but I think it’s his fault, and let’s be honest here—I’m the one who taught them to use the zero-g litterbox, so I have moral superiority, as far as the cats are concerned, nearly forever. A cat who engages in litterbox terrorism on a space ship is not a good shipping companion.
We were relaxing, finally. Connla had pulled on a film of his own again, just in case—mostly at Singer’s insistence—and he watched me eat now while I mostly floated with my eyes half-closed, sucking spaghetti down. I was starving, and had told Singer not to let me exceed my calorie ration, in case we needed those molecules. I’m generally always hungry—could eat all dia—but I couldn’t help but wonder if this wasn’t a bit excessive, and didn’t have something to do with the sparkleweb that now covered my entire body, my scalp and the skin on my face included. At least my mucous membranes were free of sparkles. It’d be disconcerting if my nostrils and the inside of my eyelids started to glow.
Well, it wasn’t going to be easy to hide. And it was certainly going to make me memorable. Good thing we weren’t criminals.
In a minute, we were going to have to get up and do something about surviving, but thrashing is worse than not doing anything at all. So, for the moment, a break.
I was thinking about coffee for dessert when Connla stretched his long legs out, focused a very green pair of eyes on me, and said, “Waste this.”
“What?”
He laced his fingers behind his head and studied my face. I tried not to feel self-conscious about the sparkles floating under my skin. He said, “Fuck it. It’s a really long trip home, if we even make it home. We can try to maintain isolation, which is going to be a pain in the ass when there’s one head and one galley. Or we can just accept that if it’s virulent we’re all going to get it, and get on with our lives.”
His decision had obviously been made already, because as I watched he started stripping the film back from his chest, unsealing it and stretching it to make a hole big enough so he could wriggle out as if wiggling out of a shed, inside-out skin. A different sort of shed casing than the suit I’d left on the outside of the hull, I couldn’t help but thinking.
I said, “What about the cats?”
“If we die of space poison, Singer will get them home and take care of them somehow, I’m sure. And if they get space poison too, he’ll download himself out of the vessel and ditch it into the nearest sun. Right, Singer?”
Singer said, “You two are terribly irresponsible.”
“Primates,” Connla said with a shrug. “We are what we are. What are you going to do?”
“Wait,” I said. “I’m irresponsible? This is Connla’s idea.”
“Are you going to do it?” Singer asked.
I contemplated my half-eaten tube of spaghetti. Mephistopheles patted my shoulder again. She was chasing the sparkles as much as she was begging for sauce. “Do you think I shouldn’t?”
Singer made a wordless sound that was his equivalent of a shrug. “I am not equipped to assess the impact of biological inconveniences upon meatforms.”
He was definitely teasing.
Gently, I pushed the cat off. She went one way—toward a nice upholstered bulkhead because I’m not a monster—and I floated, in reaction, toward the forward port. The early astronauts had to argue to get windows, I’m told. Now I looked out of this one, frowning down at the long, barred spiral curve of the galaxy we needed to move toward the center of—a center that was much smaller and farther away than we had ever meant for it to be.
“I don’t want to die in a bubble,” I said.
Connla said, “We won’t do any transfusions.”
“Hah.” But it was decided, and he helped me peel off my isolation skin.
? ? ?
The closest port was likely to be a pirate outpost, which tended to be scattered in the trailing reaches of the galaxy. Off the beaten track, protected and concealed. That wouldn’t help us, because we didn’t know where it was, couldn’t find it, and didn’t have anything to trade once we got there. But there were fringe worlds and fringe stations, places where respectable people mingled with the galactic underbelly. Those wouldn’t be without Synarche oversight. Anyplace where we could get in contact with civilization, we could trade. We didn’t have a prize, but we had knowledge, and our information on pirate and harvester activity—and what little we had on the artificial gravity—would get us help and repairs.
We set our sights on Downthehatch, which we could probably just about reach. Maybe. It was a dodgy little place by reputation, but it was worth a try, given the alternatives. I was uneasy enough about it that I might have voted the other way if I hadn’t already known that Singer and Connla had their minds made up. I know gray markets will always exist, but I have an allergy to people who took from the commonwealth and who also sold it out to predators.
“You’re not trading my skin,” I said.
“We’ll tell anybody who asks that it’s a holotoo,” Connla promised. “Garlynoch work. I’ve seen some of their stuff. It could pass as a really nice one.”
Singer said, “Unless you decide you want a more rigorous medical intervention than I can provide.”
Once under way again, we didn’t have much to do. I read a few nineteenth-century novels in Russian, Japanese, and English. They’re great for space travel because they were designed for people with time on their hands. Middlemarch. Gorgeous, but it just goes on.
The early word-processor era around the turn of the Earth millennium is good for that too, but the quality of the prose in those generally isn’t as high. Some of those epics, though, run to ten or twenty volumes, and every volume in them is thirty hours of reading time.
I even own a paper book—a compact, ultralight, onionskin volume with real fiber pages. It dates from the last third of the twentieth, and it’s called Illuminatus! I keep it because it was a gift, and it’s not so much a keepsake as . . . a kind of reminder. Of a time when I was really dumb.
It’s the one book on hand I never read anymore.
Connla studied strategy games, those favored by Synarche syster species and even, when he could find them, those invented by other aliens. Fortunately, Singer liked them too, so I had never been forced to learn the ins and outs (literally) of a-akhn-an or three-dimensional Goishan go. Which looks to me more like Chinese checkers anyway.