Galactic Empires (37 page)

Of course, there was no sign of Benj. Why would he have hidden away among the trees? Benj, at twenty-one, liked his comforts. And even if he was here, the AI's surveillance systems would have known about it.

Something whirred past Donn's face, tiny, metallic. It was a robot insect. And a fine spray of water descended on him. He lifted his face and saw droplets condensing out of the air, an artificial rain born in the summit of the lifedome and falling all around him. Above the rain, the transparent dome showed a star field that had barely changed for centuries: the Association, a cluster of stars dominated by the Boss, a single monstrous star a million times as bright as Earth's sun, an unforgiving point of light. He was getting slowly wet, but he didn't mind; he found the sensation oddly comforting on this difficult morning.

"Beautiful, isn't it? The star field."

The smooth voice made him start. He turned.

Commissary Elah stood beside him. Her eyes were large and dark, her gaze fixed on his face, calculating, judgmental. Taller than Donn, she was dressed in a Commissary's floor-length black robe, a costume so drab it seemed to suck all the light out of the air. Her scalp was shaved, a starkness that emphasized the beauty of her well-defined chin and cheekbones, and her skin gleamed with droplets of the artificial rain. Donn had no idea how old she was.

"I didn't mean to startle you," she said.

Something about her made Donn pull his robe tighter around his body. "Commissary. It's good of you to have come out so quickly. My parents will be reassured-"

"I hope so. I've brought some specialist help. A woman called Eve Raoul—a Virtual, actually, but quite expert. This is what we're here for, the Commission for Historical Truth. To help." Her accent sounded odd to a Reefborn, slightly strangulated at the back of the throat—an accent from Earth. "The Coalition understands."

"I suppose it must," Donn said. "If it seeks to rule."

"Not to rule," said Elah gently. "To join all of scattered mankind behind a common purpose. And by helping you sort out issues like this with the Ghosts—"

"Nobody knows for sure if the Ghosts are behind these abductions."

She eyed him. "But the Ghosts aren't denying it. Are you loyal to the Ghosts or your family, Donn Wyman?"

"I-" He didn't know what to say to that direct question; he didn't think in such terms. "Why must I choose?"

She reached out with a pale hand and stroked the trunk of an oak tree. "Remarkable, these plants. So strange. So strong!"

"They are trees. Don't you have any on Earth anymore?"

She shrugged. "Probably. In laboratories. Earth has other purposes now than to grow trees." She glanced around. "You know, I've visited the
Miriam Berg
several times. But I've never stood in this very spot, beneath these trees. Trade, your profession, isn't it?"

"I'm an interspecies factor, specializing in relations with the Ghost enclaves."

"It's all so deliriously archaic. And anti-Doctrinal, of course, your way of life, your ship's existence, its very name, all relics of a forbidden past!" She laughed. "But don't worry, we've no intention of turning you out summarily. All things in time." She pushed at the earth, the grass, with a bare foot. "We're on the ship's axis here, yes? Over the spine. Your mother's family came to the Reef in mis ship, didn't they, a thousand years ago? I imagine there are access hatches. Is it possible to reach the drive pod from here?"

"That's nothing to do with you." Samm came bustling up. Beside Elah's cool composure, his father looked a crumpled mess, Donn thought, his hair sticking up like the grass under their feet, his face shining with the sweat of sleep.

"I apologize," Elah said easily. "You did invite me here."

With his arms outstretched, Samm escorted her away from the copse. "To help with looking for Benj. Not to go snooping around the
Miriam.'"
But as she walked with him, he backed down, nervous of offending the new agency from Earth that had taken over all their lives. "We're all distressed."

"I understand."

Donn lingered for another few seconds under the artificial rain. He wondered why his father should care about the Commissary, or any Coalition agent, snooping around this thousand-year-old heap of junk. Maybe he had trade goods tucked down there in the spine-given the Coalition's new tax codes, Donn thought that was quite likely-but if so, he couldn't have signaled it any more clearly. Not subtle, Donn's father, whatever other qualities he might have.

But as Donn stood there, the complexities of Reef politics faded, and the reality of his brother's loss crowded back into his head, the true story of the day. For months, the abductions had been an arbitrary plague. Nobody could rest, for at any moment, you could be taken, too, from the most secure place. What a horror it was. And now it had come here, to his own family. He wondered, in fact, how it was he felt so calm himself. Shock, perhaps.

He trailed after his father, and the Commissary. And in a lounge at the edge of the plaza, he found a Virtual woman trying to console his mother.

"Before I died, I spent most of my working life exploring the principles of remote translation systems."

The visitor sat beside Rima on a couch. Donn's mother's face was twisted with grief and anger. Bots hovered before them, bearing trays of drinks and pastries-breakfast; it was still early.

The visitor was slim, modestly dressed in a pale blue coverall. Her hair was gray, and she pulled at a stray lock of it absently. Donn had never seen anybody with gray hair before, though he knew it had once been the default shade for the aging. Evidently the visitor's projection was good enough to fool the serving bots, but Donn observed that her interfacing with the chair wasn't quite right, and a haze of tiny pixels shimmered around the underside of her legs.

Rima asked, irritated, impatient, "Remote translation systems?"

Commissary Elah said, "Teleportation, to you and me. Donn Wyman, meet Eve Raoul. The expert I told you about."

Eve stood. Donn clumsily offered this Virtual visitor a hand to shake. She bowed, apparently unoffended. "I'm sorry to meet you in such circumstances."

"Eve Raoul," Donn said, "do you have a connection to
the
Raoul, Jack Raoul?"

"He was my husband. I died before him." She gestured at her slim body. "It's thanks to him that this representation was reconstructed from my old Notebooks. He liked to have me around in person to counsel him about quantum mechanics and the like, in the course of his work. And in the work he did, his dealings with the Ghosts, there was a
lot
of that."

Elah said, "Eve is a specialist in the sort of technologies that seem to be deployed here-abduction through some sort of teleport device, apparently. And so we employ her to offer advice and counseling to relatives of abductees."

"Counseling," said Rima, skeptical. "Jack Raoul died eight years ago." She glared at Elah. "Or rather he was executed for his 'crimes.' He was pretty old by that time wasn't he?"

"Over two hundred years old," Eve said softly. "He left my Notebooks to the Commission, and to the Ghosts."

"He must have loved you," Donn blurted. Jack Raoul was well remembered here, a hero for the Reef's multispecies community, for his work in bringing about constructive working relationships between humans and Ghosts. Evidently, he was capable of great passion, too.

But Eve grimaced. "I was his legacy to an alien species. That tells you all you need to know about what it was like to be loved by Jack Raoul. However, here I am. And, since I know you're thinking it, it's more than a hundred and fifty years since my own death."

Rima snorted. "Then what use are you? How can these Notebooks of yours be up-to-date?"

"It's the best we have," Elah said sternly. "Rima, much human knowledge was lost during the Qax Occupation of Earth. That was a deliberate policy of the occupying power, in fact. One of our purposes in recontacting lost communities like this one."

"We weren't lost," said Donn.

Elah plowed on. "Our purpose is to reacquire such lost knowledge. And Eve and her Notebooks are a treasure. It's good of her to work with the Coalition, especially after the difficulties surrounding her husband's case."

Eve ignored this barrage of euphemism. "I have to tell you, though," she admitted, "that I may not be much help at all. Human technologists have never got very far with teleportation. How could a translation device work? Perhaps by scanning the position of every particle in an object, you might think. That information could be transferred somewhere else and a copy constructed of the original, exact down to the last electron."

Donn frowned. "But that couldn't work. The uncertainty principle—you can't specify a particle's momentum and position precisely."

"Correct," she said approvingly. "In quantum mechanics, such quantities as position are derived from probabilistic wave functions—mathematical descriptions that underlie all reality.
But
the principle says nothing about transferring exact data about the wave functions themselves. That was the approach I was working on, before I died."

Rima asked, "What about Ghost technology?"

"My husband, in the course of his career dealing with the Ghosts, came across one example of a teleport-like device. It was all to do with breaking up electrons: dividing indivisible particles."

They looked at her blankly.

Eve said, "Look—an electron's quantum wave function is spherical in its lowest energy state. But in its next highest energy state, the wave function has a dumbbell shape. Now, if that dumbbell could be stretched and pinched, could it be divided? If so, when the function collapses, it could be as if an electron leapt instantaneously from one bubble to another."

Rima was fighting her way through this fog of words. "Is that how the Ghosts took away my son?"

"No," Eve said regretfully. "I'm sorry. The sort of processes I've described would leave behind physical traces. Various exotic particles that your AI would record. We're investigating every case. I'm hopeful that when we do start to turn up physical traces of some kind—"

Samm said suddenly, "What about supersymmetry?"

Rima shook her head.
"What?"

"Another corner of physics. Just an interest of mine. Have the Ghosts worked with that?"

"Not that we know of," said Eve.

Rima glared at her husband. "Don't waste time, you fool."

Donn felt he had to say, "Everybody keeps saying it's the Ghosts. We don't even know if it
is
the Ghosts behind this."

Rima said bitterly, "Oh, of course it's the wretched Ghosts. Everybody knows it." She glanced upward at the Boss, the gleaming star that cast shadows even here inside the lifedome. "I grew up thinking the Ghosts were all right. But things have changed. They're up to something. Everybody knows that. They say there's a new sort of Ghost up there, deeper in the Association. A Seer, who can see into past and future."

"Now, that's all rumor," Samm said. "Gossip. Troublemaking."

"No wonder they can take away our children, if
that's
true. Because if they can see into the future, they could sneak in here with one of those Silvermen of theirs."

"Oh, Rima," Samm said, distressed.

Eve said uncertainly, "Getting back to teleportation-"

"What use are you?" Rima snapped. "You don't know anything. You've said so."

Elah said smoothly, "She's here to assure you that the Commission is doing all we can."

Rima got to her feet and pointed. "And I suppose you brought
that
with you to reassure me."

They all turned.

A Silver Ghost hovered in the plaza, only paces away from them, a silver sphere, quite featureless, a mercury droplet as tall as a man. It shifted a little as it hovered just above the floor, as if its immense bulk could be pushed by the breezes of the air-conditioning.

"You took him," Rima said. "You took my son."

Samm tried to get hold of his wife. "Rima, be calm."

But she shook him away. "What have you done with him?" She ran at the Ghost, her fists flailing. Her fists just passed through its hull, scattering silvery pixels. The Ghost hovered impassively. Samm pulled Rima away. "Give him back," she begged. "Oh, give him back!"

Eve Raoul stood, obviously distressed, as if she longed to help. The Commissary simply watched, cold, observant. Donn was hot with anxiety and embarrassment.

The Ghost said: "I apologize for the intrusion. I am the Sink Ambassador."

Samm snapped, "The
what?"

"The Heat Sink, Dad," Donn said, "which is the sky, to them. He's their Ambassador to the sky."

The Ambassador said, "Eve Raoul-it is good to see you again."

"I wish I could say the same," Eve said.

Samm, bewildered, tortured, looked from one to the other. "What do you want, Ghost?"

The Ghost rolled. "Donn Wyman, we need your help."

The Sink Ambassador said there was trouble in a bar called Minda's Savior, set in a generation starship near the heart of the Reefs three-dimensional tangle of ships-a Silverman, in some kind of trouble.

Elah faced the Ghost Virtual. "Ambassador to the Heat Sink, you call yourself."

"Yes."

"You know Eve through Jack Raoul."

"I worked with Jack Raoul on many complex and demanding issues. I like to believe we were friends, Eve and I, and Jack and I."

Elah laughed at that, the idea that humans and Ghosts could be friends. "And now you consult Donn Wyman. He's just a factor, a trade negotiator."

Donn felt dismissed, vaguely insulted.

The Ambassador said, "Since the collapse of the old Raoul Accords, the legal interface between Ghost and human communities has been shredded. But humans like Donn, and Ghosts like myself, must work together over trade; the Ghost enclaves here could not survive without trade. And individual contacts made in such circumstances serve well in trying to resolve other issues as they arise."

"There was no need to call on a mere factor," Elah said. "I am a Commissary. I represent the Coalition, mankind's highest authority."