Best of all were the packet vessels, which were full of information. And the ancient prizes from early exploration—by any race—that were treasure troves of archaeological data. That would be worth a few RAVs above the cost of the mission.
I didn’t even bother to consider the possibility that the hulk could be an ancient ship from a time long before that remembered by humans, or even any of the older syster species. I’d heard about Koregoi ships with salvageable tech. I’d never encountered one. Or even encountered anyone who admitted they had. But wouldn’t it be nice . . . ?
Well, that wouldn’t be behind a fresh scar, anyway. So honestly I was just black-sky diadreaming, indulging myself in fantasies of untold wealth. Or of at least buying Singer out of copyright so he would own his own code.
I was still on edge, and now it was too close to contact for me to bump my chems and get any restful sleep. Growing up clade—and a flirtation with chemical dependency after I broke free—had left me wary of the easy out, anyway, so I rarely thought of fixing the problem at the transmitter level when it was possible for me to ride it out.
When I remembered, or Singer nagged me into it, I always wondered why I hadn’t bumped earlier. Why I’d been so resistant in the first place. And except for a few permanent mental health adjustments, I always insisted on a limited adjustment that would wear off in half a dia or so.
Well, if people made sense, we’d be like Singer.
I turned away from the port. There would be a distraction of some sort in the command cabin, and I could caffeinate. Or bump, and tune for wakefulness since I’d missed the shuttle on rest.
I slid down the tunnel to the bridge headfirst, pushing off rungs in the tube with my fore-and afthands, avoiding bruising the lettuce and radishes growing along Singer’s living walls. The ship’s calico cats, Mephistopheles and Bushyasta, were floating in the tube, napping in a cuddle. Bushyasta, like the professional sleeper she was, had one set of claws hooked into the terry cloth of a grab loop. Mephistopheles was floating beside her, a red-and-white leg draped for an anchor over Bushyasta’s belly, her black-splashed head cuddled on a mottled flank. Well, at least somebody was getting some rest around here.
I glided the last meter or so—it wasn’t far: Singer really was a tiny bubble of a thing for frail warm meat to take to space in—and found myself gazing at the back of Connla’s head.
He’d anchored himself to a rail with his afthands, and his forehands were buried elbow-deep in the stuff of his console. His ponytail waved lazily behind him as he turned his head. I caught a glimpse of stubborn profile outlined against starfield and suppressed a smile.
He started to say something, coughed, and corrected himself. “Wouldn’t sleep?”
I could have argued—couldn’t—but I knew my unwillingness to tune my chem was opaque to Connla on an emotional level even when he professed to understand it intellectually. I thought he’d actually maybe mellow and mature a bit if he didn’t bump and tune so much to keep his responses calmed down to Spartacus’s stoic ideals. On the other hand, I’d have to put up with him finally experiencing adolescence, and that whole thing was such a mess I’d turned mine off when it happened. Well, okay, a little bit after it happened. Some people have to learn the hard way, and apparently I am one of them.
It was his brain and his chem and his business, so I just said, “We should have pulled a permit.”
“And let every other tug in the galaxy know where we were headed?”
“And have a chance of a rescue operation if we screw it up.” I settled near my console, floating with one afthand resting lightly against a rail, and watched out the forward windows as ripples of light gathered and spread.
Connla laughed. “You put on such a rebel act, but I keep hearing your crèche talking out of your mouth again and again. Anybody raised outside of a clade knows that it’s easier to get forgiveness than permission. Besides, a permit isn’t strictly legally necessary all the way out here. We’re not in anybody’s jurisdiction.”
He was transparent when he was baiting me. His own upbringing had left a few antisocial marks on him, but try to get him to admit that. If he hadn’t been such a good guy from the DNA on up, he would have been insufferable. And quite possibly socially dangerous.
“Forgiveness is not the same thing as retroactive consent, Connla. And the research shows that people are much more altruistic when they’re allowed to offer, instead of when something is demanded of them. There will be more red tape on the other end, this way.” He didn’t answer, so I said, “How much longer?”
“Ninety-seven seconds to the decel.”
My console felt cool and ready when I touched its carbonglas surface with my fingertips, just enough to stabilize, balance, and get a spherical perspective. I didn’t bury my hands in my console the way Connla had, but I wasn’t flying the bus.
Well, okay, Singer was flying the bus. But Connla was directing, and he needed to be plugged in to Singer’s full senso.
A wide arc of stars swung below and behind Singer like the frozen skirts of a flamenco dancer: the Milky Way, seen from . . . not exactly outside, but far to one edge, and an angle. Scuttling fingers tap-danced up my spine at the sight of home, so far away. Which was ridiculous, because it wasn’t home to me—Singer was. And we were in no more danger here than anywhere else in space. Maybe even a little less than if we were camped in some cluttered, long-inhabited system full of meteors, traffic that couldn’t follow a flight plan, and poorly mapped space junk.
It’s a territorial mammal thing, is all. There’s a sense of being long and far away from places you know your way around and have resources in that gets right up into the anxiety centers and made me feel lost and out of place.
We were off our turf, and my amygdala knew it.
Connla was cool and collected. I felt his calm through our link like a lapping sea. He didn’t look over at me to roll his eyes, a demonstration of self-control better than I’d have been able to manage. He’d didn’t have to tell me that he thought my resistance to tuning my mood was childish and irresponsible.
But he hadn’t grown up in a clade. He hadn’t escaped a clade. And the hypervigilance was my friend. His friend, too, if he’d ever admit it. Sure, it was uncomfortable. But that was a small price to pay for being ready. Getting caught by a disaster is bad enough. Getting caught by a disaster you didn’t expect adds that layer of humiliation and stunned goggle-eyed frozenness to the proceedings, and that doesn’t benefit you in the long run.
All of those memories were stored in my fox, and I would have shared the ayatana with him if he’d given me half an excuse. But he had never gotten past his childhood programming that feelings were sticky and somehow slightly revolting. So it was an element of our friendship that remained unexplored.
And thus my uneasy feeling could have just been my old friend Uneasy Feeling, dropping by to see how things were shaking. It could have been that territorial fear of not knowing where I was, and where to find food, shelter, water, and my tribe. But it never hurt to be on your guard.
Yep. Sleeping with one eye open, that’s me. People only think it’s ridiculous if they’ve never been caught napping by an enemy. And the truth of the universe is that anybody can turn out to be an enemy.
“Let’s keep the bubble up for now in case we have to move in a hurry,” I said.
Connla didn’t argue. He cleared his throat and said, “Singer, are you awake?”
“More awake than you are,” the ship replied. Most ships are she, for bigoted gender-essentialist historical reasons, and most of the rest see no reason to bother being gendered at all and call themselves they, but Singer liked a male identity.
He hadn’t always been a tugboat, I gathered. He had a bantering manner, which was just code, but when it came right down to it I was just code too, running on some kludged-together hardware.
He added, “What can I do for you?”
Singer was smart as hell, a born problem-solver if you told him what problem to solve for and gave him some parameters that he could extrapolate. But artificial personalities were intentionally limited in their self-direction and agency, for reasons that will be obvious to a cursory inquiry.