It was huge. Inexpressibly huge, like being stared down by a space ship. I took a step forward and pressed my hands against the window once again. The enormous creature’s presence was magnetic. And it wasn’t as if running away would protect me from it, when all it had to do to deal with me was to disassemble the ship.
I guessed we’d just answered the question once and for all of exactly how sapient the Ativahikas were. And how they communicated. Which begged the question of exactly how I was going to communicate with it.
Well, it seemed to have no difficulty making itself understood to me. So I resolved that I would just . . . try to talk, and see what happened.
“I am deeply and profoundly sorry,” I said. “It was not by my choice, what happened. And I did not understand immediately what I had become infected with.”
You went to the ship of the murderers.
“I did,” I said. Honesty was pretty obviously the best policy here. Not just for ethical reasons, but because when you’re confronted with a superpowerful alien who is already in possession of rather a lot of inside information, it’s probably best not to get caught in a lie.
What was your purpose in going there, if you are not yourself a murderer?
“I went to salvage a derelict ship, so that its materials could be reused and so that, perhaps, the hulk could be rescued and repurposed. I did not realize until after I had entered the ship what its purpose was and what crimes the ship had been engaged in.”
And yet, you contain the symbiote.
“I contracted it by accident.” My palms were leaving mists of water vapor on the window where I leaned. I scrubbed them dry on my shirt.
That explanation left out Farweather, but honestly she was welcome to do her own explaining. The Ativahikas would have to crush the Koregoi ship anyway, to get to her, and let’s be even more honest, since we’re already neck-deep in honesty: they couldn’t do that without destroying me and quite possibly Singer as well.
So I was going to keep saying “I.” Assuming the Ativahikas even understood the difference between singular and plural pronouns, or how Terran humans tended to define the boundaries of self, I had no desire to get Singer or Connla (if Connla was even still alive) into trouble with the Ativahika.
Farweather was on her own, though. I wasn’t taking a fall for a mass murderer.
I expected the Ativahika’s next question to be something along the lines of “How do I know if you’re telling me the truth?” but it did not even appear to consider my lying as a possibility. I wondered if that meant it had some way of telling, or if the concept of being bullshitted was as alien to the Ativahika’s experience as the Ativahika itself was to me.
What it said instead was, How would you use this gift, if you were allowed to keep it?
Well, that stumped me. Or stunned me into silence, more precisely.
What had I planned to do, before I got derailed by being kidnapped by pirates?
“I’d use it for the good of the systers,” I said. “Under the direction of our Synarche. I’d use it to help people.”
I knew it was true as I said it. It had a sense of purpose to it that I liked. It made me feel like I was going somewhere, and maybe even knew where that somewhere was.
But you are fleeing the Synarche ship. And you are not going to the Core. You are going to a stronghold of the murderers.
“Yeah,” I said. “About that.”
Hoping Singer would jump into the conversation, I looked around. But of course he could only hear my side of it, because he hadn’t rebooted and reconnected to my senso yet. Across the deck, Farweather didn’t seem to be having a conversation of her own. Instead, she drifted steadily closer to me, her mouth congealing into a thin line. She could obviously hear both sides of the conversation, unless the ancient Ativahika was saying something different to her.
What was the natural life expectancy of an Ativahika, anyway? How long did it take for one such as this to get old? Not merely old, I judged, looking at the creature again. But venerable. I wondered if it knew the lore of the Koregoi, and if it could share that information with the systers. And what we could possibly offer in exchange to induce it to do so.
It was conceivable—conceivable, and perhaps even plausible—that the very Ativahika to whom I was speaking right this very instant was old enough in its own person to remember our forerunners. I wished I had the opportunity to ask it and find out. But right now, somehow, didn’t seem to be the appropriate time for it.
Maybe some other occasion would present itself, when I wasn’t being interrogated on suspicion of capital crimes.
About that, the ancient one said.
Not words. Not colloquial language, such as I had used. But a sense of it echoing the sentiment I’d just expressed, and reinforcing it.
Please. Tell me more.
So.
I did.
I told it that we had followed ancient roadmarks to the mothballed vessel we were now in, and I told it that before its people had managed to drag us down out of white space, we had been out of control, on autopilot, and that the shipmind and I had been working to hack—or unhack!—the ship to regain control of her. I did not ask it how the hell it and its species-mates had managed to locate us in white space, of all the impossible tricks, nor how they had managed to contact, grapple, and stop us, hauling us back into the unfolded world. If that was what, indeed, had happened.
I did not tell it specifically that Farweather had been involved in the death of the Ativahika we’d found orbiting the Jothari factory ship, or that she’d murdered the Jothari crew. I did not tell it that she was responsible for our previous trajectory, because that would have resulted in physical problems for her, and perhaps physical and definitely ethical problems for me. I didn’t mention her at all.
It turned out I needn’t have wasted my time playing liar-by-omission, anyway, because apparently the Ativahika already knew more about Farweather than they’d been letting on. As I found out when the ancient one said to me, And would you send your shipmate to face our justice? The one like you, not the shipmind.
“I won’t argue that she doesn’t deserve whatever justice you have in mind for her,” I said. “But what do you mean by ‘send’ her?”
Its catfishy face hung against a night scattered with only a few dim stars. Tendrils and fronds writhed around a long, lipless mouth designed to gnaw water and minerals from space debris, under conditions where water was a stone. It was so close beside our motionless ship that I could have touched it, or nearly, if there had not been windows and the hull in the way. I could not take it all in at once. I could glance at an eye, the fronds, the smoothly shaded aquamarine skin. But it was too big and too close for me to see it as all of a thing.
We can crush your ship, if you prefer.
Not exactly my ship, but there are times to split hairs. And times to do something else, instead.
“I know that,” I said. My stomach felt like it was boiling.
And yet you protect that creature.
I didn’t have an answer. “I don’t want to protect her, exactly. She doesn’t need or want my protection, I imagine. But I don’t want to be complicit in her death.”
Do you think it—she—would protect you?
I felt it correcting itself, trying to understand the concepts I was expressing and searching its own referents for an analogy. I don’t think it had any idea what he or she or it referred to. Just that they were arbitrary categories of some kind that were important to me, for whatever reason, so it would try to abide by them.
“No,” I said. “Actually, I’m confident that she’d hang me out a window the second you asked, if our positions were reversed.”
You did not lie for it.
“I did not.” I guess it could tell if I was being truthful, after all.
It’s always a good idea to play it safe when you can. Well, unless you’re Connla. He has—had?—a knack for getting away with things.
Hope was a terrible thing, I reminded myself. I could not afford to feel it.
You did not volunteer information either.
“I was pretty sure that if I did tell you—I mean, you, the Ativahika—everything I knew about Farweather, well. You lot would probably insist on me dragging her to an airlock and turning her over to you, space suit or no space suit, and I didn’t really want to be a party to that.”
Why does it not speak for itself?
I looked over at Farweather. Her eyes were dilated, and she had dropped down to a crouch, resting her palms against the deck.
I said, “Perhaps she does not know what to say.”
There was a fairly long silence then. Well, obviously, the Ativahika’s entire part of the conversation was silent because it was in my head. But it stopped . . . speaking? Sending impressions? And I fell still.