Long-haul flyers need hobbies. I know one AI on a salvage vessel who took up writing 3D scripts and interactives. She did so well she quit the salvage business and went off to live in the AI equivalent of a luxe beach home, some computronium colony around a dwarf star in the Core, with all the company, low lag times, processing cycles, and lack of travel you could want.
She—or a sub, anyway—got back into salvage a few ans later. The story as I heard it goes that she couldn’t write anymore, with all that stimulation, so in order to maintain her lifestyle, she had to near-isolate a branch of herself to get some damned writing done.
Still, nice work if you can get it.
I was floating near a viewport with my screen and Jane Eyre. It’s kind of horrifying to think of an era when people were so constrained to and by gender, in which the externals you were born with were something you would be stuck with your whole life, could never alter, and it would determine your entire social role and your potential for emotional fulfillment and intellectual achievement. So I wasn’t really reading. I was thinking about social history (I grew up in a human-female isolationist clade, and since I left it’s given me a powerful aversion to species and gender absolutists) and watching the bands of lensed light ripple by, wondering if it was getting a little brighter out there. The folded sky could be hypnotizing.
I realized that I could feel those folds and lenses on my skin.
They felt like—like ripples in a wave tank, passing over me as I lay just under the surface. A sense of pressure, and then a sense of suction, behind. Not like a touch, exactly. More like something passing near your skin, close enough that the sensory hairs can feel it, but it doesn’t brush your body exactly. Or like when you’re tuned into somebody else’s senso and getting what they’re getting, only at a remove.
“Koregoi senso,” I muttered, making a fist with my right hand. It shimmered in response.
I concentrated, closing my eyes. Something under the lensing ripples, something shadowy and vast. Convoluted. Arcing, sliding, gliding—
Singer said flatly, “I made a mistake.”
It took me a few seconds to blink back into myself. In that time, Connla had pulled himself out of his study hood and floated over. “What kind of a mistake?”
“We don’t have the fuel to get to Downthehatch before you and the cats starve to death. Or rather, we do. But then we couldn’t brake. Even if we recycle and reprint every organic object on this ship, including the cats and your own bodily waste.”
“We’re not eating the cats,” Connla said.
“They’ll eat you,” Singer pointed out.
Connla and I both shrugged. Cats were predators. Once you stopped being warm, you were just a source of calories. That was their moral calculus.
I said, “How is this possible?”
“I don’t know. I’m running diagnostics now—” He cleared his nonexistent throat. “So it looks like one of the storage tanks was damaged when we were shot off the prize. Sensors were damaged. They didn’t register it, and didn’t register the leak. But there’s less fuel than there should be.”
“Not to get nitpicky,” I said, “but what if we ditched enough mass to compensate?”
“We don’t have enough ditchable mass to do that with. There’s not a lot of Singer going spare.”
This was true, and a drawback of the recycle-and-print model we were operating on. Connla and I looked at each other. I said, “Well. There’s no point in decelerating now. Let’s stop adding v and just keep going, and try to think of a solution before we become an ironic footnote to salvage tug history, shall we?”
? ? ?
We went to our separate corners to muse, and mope, and stare thoughtfully out the viewports. Keeping ourselves occupied.
In the face of the unthinkable, there wasn’t much else to do except think about it obsessively. And sometimes, staring out the window turned out to be effective, as I discovered when something finally tickled my awareness just long enough to be useful.
I looked up, and with my fingertips, turned myself around.
“I have a solution,” I announced. I put more conviction in it than I was really sure it deserved.
“It’s better than being part of the precipitate,” Connla replied, but it was habitual and his heart wasn’t in it. He gazed at me with the sort of interest one reserves for reprieves from the guillotine and similarly refocusing events. “Let’s hear it.”
I held my hands out into the light so the gently moving webwork would sparkle. My clademothers were going to have a fit if they ever saw me again. We had a doctrine against body modification even for noncosmetic health or professional reasons, and even when I’d broken with them, I’d never gone out of my way to mod up. Except the zero-g adaptations, of course.
Now here I was covered in rainbow holograms.
Oh well. I wasn’t about to go looking for them. And if we ran into each other by chance—the sort of thing that inevitably happened in the biggest of universes—maybe I would get lucky and they wouldn’t recognize me.
“Guys, I seem to be developing some new senses.”
They—or at least Connla—gaped at me, so I unlocked my fox and tuned them in to my senso to prove it.
We hung there together like three ships in formation while I projected them into the tactile map of what I was perceiving. Singer figured out what I was up to pretty fast and took over rendering the feelings into a visualization. His version came out rather more accurate than mine, and faster too, as he had the cycles to throw at it.
All around us, the swoops and spirals of a convoluted landscape shivered into being. Singer’s sense of humor being what it was—the opposite of vestigial, though you’d never get to me admit that in his hearing—he decorated the projection with the traditional lines and circles of gravmap wireframe. Because it was a gravmap, and I was feeling the curvature of space-time it indicated—at a distance—through my skin.
Of the things that bind the universe together, gravity is not a particularly strong force, as it happens. It just . . . never stops reaching. That always sort of made me feel good about gravity. It’s always looking for the next rock, always sliding something down a breaker in space-time, whipping something in a long, arcing curve around something else. Gravity doesn’t give up. It keeps on trucking.
I won’t get into any solemn metaphorical particulars about the human spirit here, but you see what I’m driving at. I just really like gravity as a concept. As much as I hate having to operate under its influence.
I could tell from the way Singer was studying the map that he was feeling pretty positive about gravity too, just now.
“We can take a shortcut,” he said, thinking out loud for our benefit.
“You mean, use the existing folds in space-time to work with the drive compression, rather than brute-forcing across it. The old gravity whip trick, except in white space.”
“Gravity’s water slide,” Connla said, with the sense of a grin.
“Technically, all water slides are gravity’s,” Singer said. “Yes, Haimey. This should be enough to get us home. Within your projected lifetimes, based on available resources. And without eating the cats.”
CHAPTER 6
THE CATS, BEING CATS, WERE suitably ungrateful for their reprieve. By the time I got to check on them, Bushyasta was asleep next to the fridge, her paw hooked into a nylon grab loop. She had earned her name the old-fashioned way, by living up to it.
I had no idea where Mephistopheles had wandered off to.
I edged around Bushyasta and fixed myself a bubble of coffee, feeling relieved that the banter between Connla and me had picked back up in a much more natural and unstrained fashion. It was still going to take us a really long time to get home. A subjective eternity, I realized, as Singer started talking about his political theories again.
Still, not dying made up for a lot.
“Thanks, parasite,” I muttered.
The parasite didn’t answer.
Coffee is amazing, and one benefit of having only cats, an AI, and another human as shipmates is that I can drink it in public areas without grossing out the aliens. Something about the organic esters makes it smell—and taste—vile to just about every other ox-breathing syster I might find myself sharing an atmosphere with, so it’s considered polite to keep that particular stimulant among humans. People coming off the homeworlds are always a little frustrated that it’s considered incredibly rude to walk around with coffee everywhere they go.