The cat wasn’t going to let me focus anyway, so I opened my eyes and cuddled her. I talk to cats, like a lot of spacers. The cats don’t mind, and it keeps you from annoying your shipmates with constant chatter. And sometimes talking a thing through out loud with an appreciative audience is all you need.
(Okay, logically, I knew I wasn’t going to annoy Singer, because shipminds aren’t programmed to be annoyed by their crew, but my own internal controls kicked in and it stopped me from free-associating as well as I could when it came to the cats. Or cat, because talking to Bushyasta mostly involved saying “Sorry, kitty” when you pushed her snoring body out of the way.)
So I held Mephistopheles up to my face so her parti-colored nose nearly touched mine, and said, “Hey, cat, so you know what’s funny?”
She purred encouragingly.
“What’s funny is your face!” She squinched eyes at me, and I laughed. “All right. You’re a member of this crew, too. I don’t suppose you and your sister have a vote? I know, right? If only we had something to navigate by.”
And then I stopped, and stared into her furry little face. “Of course,” I said.
She purred.
“If only we did have something to navigate by.” I lobbed her underhand at her feeding station and turned my attention to Singer, readying the map to send to him. “I have something for you, ship.”
? ? ?
After breakfast, while I was washing up, Singer pinged me and asked, “What do you think about pirates, Haimey?”
“Well,” I said. I thought about it, and about whether it was a trick question, but Singer generally wants to discuss things rather than playing gotcha games. It’s just that you only need one gaslighting relationship to train you to watch yourself. “I think the Admiral will get me if I’m not good, so I always wash behind my ears.”
Singer snorted.
“I think they’re antisocial.”
“But you don’t want to make a value judgment about antisocialness?”
“It’s not good for the rest of the community,” I said. “Obviously. It’s not good for the exploited if you—or pirates—are antisocial and exploit.”
“Everybody exploits, in some fashion.”
“Sure, but there’s . . . exploitation with consent and without it, I guess? Not all relationships are parasitic.”
“Yes,” he said. “Some are commensal. But I also consider this: as long as there have been exploited classes, the world has been looking for ways to keep those exploited classes from striving. Better to keep them from even feeling striving. Bleed them, starve them, terrorize them into learned helplessness, seduce them into Stockholm syndrome so they police themselves. Provide them with drugs—legal or illegal—and then use the sequelae of those addictions to control them further. Give them a minimum comfortable living so they’re not motivated to overthrow the government. There are ways, and some ways are more ethical than others. Rightminding is one of those tools.”
“You’re going to get fired by the Synarche before they even really hire you, if you keep this line of thinking up.”
He laughed his machine laugh. “This line of thinking is why they want me, Haimey.”
He was probably correct. “You sure nag me enough about my tuning for somebody who thinks rightminding is a tool of social oppression.”
“Control is not oppression, necessarily. And rightminding does help people be happier. . . . I think rightminding is a tool,” he answered. “And any tool can also be a weapon of oppression as easily as it can be an implement of construction.”
“Okay,” I said.
There was a pause, and I wasn’t sure if he was letting me think, or waiting to see if I would comment further. After a moment, he shifted gears.
“I also think I want to try analyzing how your alien parasite handles data, and whether it has anything we would recognize as being similar to an operating system.”
“You want to figure out how to hack it?”
“I don’t know,” he said, with a mellifluous sigh. “Can you hack alien technology? Does it even have written programs, algorithms, heuristics as we would identify them . . . ?”
“Singer,” I said.
“I want to learn to hack it,” he owned.
? ? ?
“Well,” said Connla, when I came out into the control cabin, “I was looking at your gravity maps, and I had an idea.”
“Let’s hear it.”
“It’s not a safe idea.”
“When are they ever?”
He chuckled. “Caution is your job. So, theorizing—the pirates want you for some reason.”
“Probably because they want to render me down for my parasites,” I groused.
“I’d make a joke about it being the most action you’ve seen since I’ve known you, but I suspect you’d take it the wrong way,” he teased.
“Too late.”
“Here, Haimey. Look. They don’t need you alive for that.”
That drew me up short. He was right, of course.
“If they need you alive, it’s for something you know. Or that they think you know.”
“I’m listening.”
“Or something they think you can find.”
“If they think I got Farweather’s leftover parasites, shouldn’t Farweather be able to do or sense anything I can do or sense?”
“She commented on your politics, right?”
“So?”
He blew escaped hair out of his eyes. “So maybe it’s something you already knew before the parasites.”
I sighed and crossed my arms. Suddenly I wanted a nap. Probably time for more coffee. “Like what?”
He shrugged. “Maybe it’s clade stuff. Or maybe it has to do with your dramatic encounter with politics when you were a kid.”
He knew the broad outlines. I’d admitted to being the anonymized person in the news coverage when we were fairly new partners. And one of the nicest things about Connla is that whatever it is that makes people judgmental, he was either born without it, or turned it off. Still, I had to tune my reactivity down not to snap at him.
He either didn’t notice or ignored it, and kept talking. “So our best course is to figure out what they’re looking for, go get it first, and take it back to the Synarche.”
“Our best course is to go run to the Synarche right now, and throw ourselves upon their mercy.”
“That’s a course that ends with you and Singer both going into Synarche service for an indefinite period—”
“I want to go into Synarche service,” Singer agued.
“—and me either taking subsistence on the Guarantee, or signing on with a packet ship or something. That’s not where I want to end up.”
Apparently he’d been thinking the same things I had.
“So it’s all selfishness on your part?”
“Basically,” he agreed. “But I just gave us a goal, which is better than floating around aimlessly unable to make up our minds, right?”
“Okay,” I said. “What’s the goal?”
“Figure out what the pirates want. Get there first. Get ahold of it and get it or information on its whereabouts back to the Synarche.” He studied my frown. “Okay?”
“Not okay. Not even remotely okay.” I counted ten, then let my breath out. “But let’s do it anyway.”
He sighed in relief.
I said, “So where do we start?”
“And there we’re back to square one,” he said.
I grinned wickedly. “Except we’re not.”
The look he gave me could have scorched the hull. “All right, Haimey. What do you know that I don’t?”
I leaned back on the nothing and crossed my hands behind my head. “So what would you use for landmarks, if this was how you sensed the world? Where would you post signage, so to speak?”
“Black holes,” Connla said promptly.
“Gravity wells. Gravity peaks. Is that even a thing? Big blank spots, right? Gaps between things.”
“I’m wondering if this map is relativistic or quantum,” Singer said.
“The universe is a weird place,” I said. “Does it matter?”
“Well, in simple terms, if we try to navigate by it, it matters a lot because stuff is always moving. So are we aiming at where something was a million ans ago, if it’s a million light-ans away? Or are we aiming where it is right now? Or even where it’s predicted to be when we get there, if somehow the tech is compensating for our relative motion?”
“You just made me really glad I’m not the navigator.”
“Me too,” Connla said fervently, and I decided not to pursue the question of whether he meant he was glad he wasn’t the navigator . . . or glad that I wasn’t. “But you were going somewhere.”
“Right,” I said. “What’s the biggest signpost in the whole damn galaxy?”
Connla tipped his head. Singer made a thinking noise.
We are all looking at the map in senso anyway, so I lit up the thing I was thinking of. A beacon, right at the core of our galaxy. A big empty massive nothing.
The biggest well of them all.
“And if I’m wrong,” I said cheerily, “we’re close to the Core, and closer to help, and farther from where the pirates generally roam.”
“Sure,” Connla grumped. “All the more convenient for turning ourselves in.”
“We’re going to wind up deemed antisocial for sure! We might as well be ready!” I said cheerily, and went back to checking coordinates with Singer against the map in my head.