And who would bring plants that you couldn’t also eat to space, up here where weight and space were at a premium? Especially if you had a big city-ship full of hungry mouths to feed, and you might be taking them to a planet where you needed to have some kind of horticulture, too. And I’d actually found part of a hydroponics operation.
Those hydroponics tanks were not currently functional . . . but there might be seed banks. And a way to turn them back on.
Remembering the hydroponics made me think of Connla, and thinking of Connla made me sad, so I thought about something else. Plans. I thought about plans. Plants and plans.
There might be an oxygen-processing center somewhere with tanks.
Okay so. Where were the tanks? I’d been all over the ship, I thought, and had some idea of where the blank bits might be, though a reliable map would have to wait for access to rendering software and processing power. Or an AI, which amounted to the same thing.
For now, I stretched out in a side corridor—one of the freefall ones—and thought about it. Plenty of blank space, and they probably wouldn’t need direct access. I mean, you could send a diver in to clean if you needed, but probably if they got contaminated or needed cleaning, or you wanted to harvest a crop and get the next crop in . . . wouldn’t you just pump the stuff out, dry it in sheets (vacuum freeze-drying! why not?) and then wash the tank out with a nice hot rinse and start over with a new batch immediately? Nobody should ever need to go in there except if it needed repairs.
Well, that said to me that I should look in the dead spaces. Or in the areas around the dead spaces, for the controls.
I had a plan. With a hungry sigh, I wedged my bundle of sleeping rags behind some pipes, fetched the space suit helmet and ox supply I hadn’t been bothering with, and I went in search of sustenance.
And maybe a shower too while I was at it.
? ? ?
Six hours later I was happily munching my way through a stack of space nori as thick as a Gutenberg Bible. It could have used a little salt and some wasabi, but it hadn’t killed me yet, and on the off chance it never did, I was already in the process of making more.
Who knew if it was nutritionally complete, or what amino acids and sugars the Koregoi used to build and fuel their bodies? And if those had any overlap at all with the ones I used?
Well, malnutrition was a slower way to die than starvation. Give it a check in the plus column and move on.
I probably contaminated the hell out of the tank with my Earth microbes while I was in there, and in memory of Singer I felt pretty bad about that, but there honestly wasn’t much I could have done to prevent it, and I was breathing commensals and microbiota all over the alien micro-ecosystem in here anyway.
In any case, my increased level of alertness and energy told me that there was something in there that I could metabolize, and my physiology got right on that, with a vengeance.
Other parts of my GI system weren’t as pleased with the radically unfamiliar food source, unfortunately.
Oh well. At least my suit handled the cleanup. And reclaimed the water. Though that wasn’t as critical now that I’d found giant tanks full of perfectly bog-standard (that was a joke) H2O.
Well, I thought it was funny, anyway. It kept me laughing to myself all the way back to my improvised dehydrator, where I planned to pack up a new crop of algae biscuits and then find a crevice to mouse myself into for a good long rest.
Laughing made me think of my shipmates. Thinking of my shipmates made me so sad about not having Singer and Connla around to impugn my sense of humor that I could barely stand it. I could almost imagine Singer’s presence sometimes, if I closed my eyes and held very still. I knew it was just my neurology sensing people who weren’t there—I’m pretty sure nobody outside of a com serial has ever been haunted by the ghost of a destroyed AI—but that didn’t remove the creepiness of being able to sense him back there.
If he’d been real, though, he would have brought books. So I could tell myself with a high confidence that I was kidding myself. Or that my neurons were kidding me, more precisely. And nobody was standing over my shoulder, observing me.
Unless this was my backbrain’s method of telling my conscious mind that Farweather had found me and was stealth-piggybacking on my Koregoi senso.
That sent a chill through me. I stopped, a flake of space nori in my hand, and looked at the webwork of glittering coppery particles swirling and washing beneath my skin. Sometime over the past couple of decians, they’d integrated into my body image and I’d stopped even consciously noticing them unless they caught my eye, or something made me think of them.
They were still pretty. And I decided that if Farweather was camped in my blind spot, well, there wasn’t much I could do about it. Singer could have chased her out, probably. I was helpless in this circumstance.
Dammit, Singer, I miss you. And not just for providing me with com security services.
Maybe I was haunted, because I swear I felt a fleeting sense of contact then, like the brush of immaterial fingers on my hair.
? ? ?
Goal number three: figure out where we were headed.
Subgoal: find a way to get that information to somebody who could help.
By this time, I had a really good mental map of the ship—both machine memories and schematics courtesy of my fox, and the more intuitive sense that came with my meat memory and the good old-fashioned senses of direction, travel time, and so forth that had kept my primate ancestors from (mostly) getting lost and eaten by leopards before they could reproduce, thereby leading us inevitably and inexorably to the stars and our rightful place amid the society of the systers.
Or, you know, blind luck and occasionally jumping really high at the right time and screaming for your friends to run away, if you don’t care to subscribe to some kind of neoimperialist Manifest Destiny for humanity. Which is one of the maladapted bits of evolutionary baggage I’m very glad we’ve mostly trained out of ourselves, now that we have the tools.
Well, the Synarche has trained out of ourselves. The Freeporters . . . still haven’t figured out the whole “sharing resources equitably” thing.
So. Back to the problem at hand: navigation. I had no access to a shipmind, or a shipmind’s database of star charts. I had no access to the controls of the Prize, and no idea how to fly it if I did other than what I’d done before, which amounted to standing in one place and whistling here kitty kitty. A tactic, to be sure. Not a tactic I thought I should attempt while standing inside it.
What I did have was the Koregoi senso. So over the next couple of diar, as my body slowly adapted to a diet of space nori biscuits, I made myself a series of bolt-holes and hiding places through the vast—and now thoroughly mapped—interior. I even felt like I had a pretty good idea of what was going on in the turf Farweather had claimed as her own.
I armed myself with a couple of flasks of water—I’d found the flasks in one of the hydroponics rooms and filled them with what I filtered from the algae tanks—and a pile of my nori cakes. Some of the nori cakes were flavored with alien shrimp bits now, which was exciting and also hadn’t killed me, and probably provided some protein. Whether it was protein my body could use or not . . . well, insert a big theatrical shrug right here.
I tried not to think about the fact that I was eating living animals and not tank-grown meat. It was a survival situation, my ancestors (barbarians) had done it for millions of generations, and anyway they probably had like three ganglia to rub together. The shrimps, not my ancestors.
And if I told myself that often enough, I could convince myself that they were basically little blue-green plants that just moved really quickly, and manage to get them down without having to adjust my neurochemistry too much to stop feeling like a monster.
The worst part was that they were actually pretty tasty. I would have felt less awful if I hated their flavor overall and was just choking them down to stay functional.
Then I holed up in one of the dens I’d located around the ship and was using as caches. I picked the one I felt most secure in: it was reasonably far from what I thought of as Farweather’s territory, and in a well-shielded forward section of the ship. Also, there was some sort of device or object in a big, sealed cargo space between it and the area where the Freeporter stayed, and that device seemed to interfere with the Koregoi senso. So while I could feel forward and off to the sides just fine, I couldn’t feel aft, toward Farweather. And I figured she couldn’t feel forward, toward me.
This was as good a spot to try a little meditation on the shape of the universe as I was likely to find, so I settled in, loosened up my suit a bit, and made myself comfortable. Then I opened my mind to the Koregoi senso, and waited to see what might arise.