While the Koregoi artifact swam its way to the surface against the current of space-time, the Synarche ships closed on us. We held a brief conference about what to do when they got there.
“Turn me over,” Singer said definitively. “Explain everything, ask them to corroborate with Goodlaw Cheeirilaq, bask in the glory of having retrieved what appears for the time being to be a fully functional Koregoi ship, and see if you can somehow get in on the study team.”
“I’m not an academic,” Connla said. “I’ll have to find a gig.”
I held my tongue. I wished I could have managed to be more excited about the unprecedented thing we’d discovered. But I didn’t want to be an academic. I really didn’t want to be an experimental subject.
And I didn’t want to be stuck in the crowded Core.
But I also really didn’t think they’d be letting me just wander off anywhere with a hide full of Koregoi tech that could sense dark gravity, create artificial gravity, and manipulate the curves of space-time. I was going to get drafted into Synarche service for a term of at least a few ans as soon as they got here, right alongside Singer.
Well, at least maybe we’d get to stay in touch, if that happened.
So I was stuck, and I couldn’t expect Connla to be stuck with me. He was too good of a pilot to sit down a well.
Even the big one.
With a sense of rising futility and entrapment, I wondered what we were going to do with the cats. I didn’t want to split them up, but the idea of losing both of them crushed me, and I couldn’t ask Connla to make that sacrifice either.
I petted Mephistopheles’s patchworky ears and bumped a load of GABA analogues in order to keep from bursting into tears. If I got to stay with Singer, Connla should get Mephistopheles and Bushyasta. It was only fair.
The band is breaking up, I thought, and laughed a little at my own melodramatics, which was a good sign the tuning was kicking in. All things end, but this had been a healthy and happy part of my life, much better than the bit before.
Good for me.
Now that I was calmer, I realized that my anxiety had come from some ancestral part of my brain that was convinced that whatever came next would be entirely and irreparably awful, and I’d probably wind up wounded and emotionally shattered again before it was through. Also, what I was losing was so good. I’d found what I wanted, and now I had to give it up.
That sucked like a singularity.
I wanted to run back to a clade and not have to make any choices again ever. I wanted to run for the Big Empty and never come back. I wanted to stop having to decide things.
It was just change panic. Change panic is awful.
Transitions suck.
Apprehension rooted in traumatic response, it turns out, doesn’t help with that.
Well, I wasn’t going to let them stick me on a planet, that was for sure. Or even a big station, if I could help it. I was staying where I didn’t have to walk, because I wasn’t going through adaptive surgery again.
? ? ?
Something big was getting close. I brought myself forcefully back from the depths of self-examination, frightened and startled for a moment because my focus had been so far away. It was the white bubble that contained the Koregoi ship, unless we were wrong about everything. (Possibly it was a killer robot from the depths of time that would eat us all and then consume the galaxy. Possibly. That had been one of Connla’s suggestions when we were discussing it earlier, probably tongue in cheek, but I wouldn’t want to be the one to tell him I’d discounted his opinion and then have it turn out to, in fact, be a killer robot from the depths of time.)
I couldn’t see it with my eyes, of course; but the archaeological senso told me where it was, and I could feel the ripples and eddies its movement left in the already gravity-stressed fabric of space-time as if somebody were dragging an anchor out of a whirlpool.
It crested—and stopped.
I held my breath as I “watched” it breach from the depths of the Saga-star, and felt my doom impending. I hadn’t been this chained to a path I had no control over since I got out of my clade.
Left to my own devices I would have bolted, Singer, Connla, cats and all. Maybe this was why people went pirate.
I had too many ethics, and too much a sense of my obligations as a citizen, to do it. Anyway, Singer wouldn’t have heard of it, so I didn’t even bring it up.
This is what we call “being socially aware.”
? ? ?
“Well,” I said. “There it is.”
“Sure is,” Singer agreed. “Can you get it into normal space remotely?”
“Do we want to?” I waved vaguely at the screens that showed the progress of our incoming entourage of Synarche vessels. “Everybody will see it, if I do.”
“We weren’t planning on hiding it.” Singer believes in following the rules.
Alas.
“Besides,” he said, “one white space spacewalk is enough for this lifetime. I would be remiss to allow you to attempt that again.”
“Aw,” Connla said. “She got away with it.”
I punched him on the arm companionably, but didn’t feel up to arguing with Singer when my interior landscape was bubbling away with subterranean volcanic activity. “I’ll try.”
I still had my contact with the ship. It didn’t seem to be trying to communicate with me through the Koregoi senso the same way Singer did through plain, old-fashioned, boring, noninfectious Synarche tech.
I examined my inputs, feeling it long before it would have come into view even if it had been in real space. We wouldn’t be able to see it until we were sharing a universe, and I wondered if it would be more efficient to do what we usually did and go close enough to it to tune our white bubble to match theirs. Or if I actually could reach out there and communicate with the thing enough to order—or convince—it to just . . . turn its white bubble off.
Singer’s detectors, like my Koregoi senso, could feel the mass, the dent it put in the fabric of this peculiar hole in space-time.
“Still no luck in figuring out how to talk to it?” I asked Singer.
“Maybe,” he said. “The problem is, I am even more sure now that it doesn’t have a shipmind. Or any kind of mind. It’s not sapient, either organically or machinewise. It’s just . . . like being noticed by a plant or something.”
“A Big Dumb Object?” Connla said helpfully.
“You’re a Big Dumb Object,” I replied. “How about you do something useful like feeding the cats?”
“I put the cats in a breath bubble,” Singer said. “Just in case.”
That was actually kind of a relief. I didn’t think the Synarche was going to open fire on us, obviously, and nobody had ever found Koregoi weapons (which made a lot of sense to me now: see above, discussion of being able to control gravity, who needs a gun?), but . . . better safe than sorry.
Nobody wants to spacewalk to an alien ship while worrying about their pets.
“Hey,” Singer said. “I think I have a connection.”
“Is it talking back?”
“Are you kidding?” he said. “I’m not even sure I can figure out yet how to ping.”
? ? ?
It took a few more diar of trial and error before he was ready to try bringing the Koregoi artifact—we were all pretty well convinced it was a ship by now—into the main line of our consensus reality and space-time, out of the pocket universe it had been so cozy in for eons. Once Singer figured out how, though, we knew we couldn’t wait. The Synarche was so close the lag on the lightspeed communication was a few standard minutes, and they were really trying to have opinions about when and where and what we should do with our friendly antique warp bubble.
Fortunately, space around the Well is saturated with radiation and clutter and loss and noise, and it’s really not surprising we couldn’t hear them very well.
So we put our fingers in our ears, and Singer unfolded space, and the Koregoi artifact popped out of the wrinkle and into Newtonian space like somebody had gently and evenly pulled smooth a blanket that had been folded around a marble.
We’d gathered in the control cabin to watch the unveiling. Connla and I both gasped aloud, as one.
It was pretty damned definitely a ship. And it was huge. Blocky, but with rounded corners and edges. Patchwork in appearance, as if the hull were constructed of vast plates that had been painted separately with different paint lots and then assembled more or less with disregard to what those color choices were. To my eyes, it was a series of warm oranges and mossy greens; I wondered what kind of color variation the eyes—or eye-analogues—of the systers who had built it saw.
A smooth, angled, wedge-shaped nose stretched back into a kind of massive, rounded parallelogram. I tasted textures, surfaces. Whatever the hull was made of, the sensors didn’t have it on file.
The thing was cold on the inside. Seriously cold. Space cold.
Methane breathers. Or dead.
I thrilled with excitement. “We got it out.”
Singer said, “And it’s big.”
“Confirmed: that’s not a human ship,” Connla said a moment later. “Or any registered syster.”
“How often does that happen twice in one trip?” I said, possibly a little more light-heartedly than the gravity of the situation suggested.