Xeelee: Endurance (25 page)

Rima said bitterly, ‘Oh, of course it’s the wretched Ghosts. Everybody knows it.’ She glanced upwards at the Boss, the gleaming, dominant star which 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 rumour,’ Samm said. ‘Gossip. Trouble-making—’

‘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 as well.’

They all turned.

A Silver Ghost hovered in the plaza, only paces away from them. It was a mirrored sphere, quite featureless, a mercury droplet as tall as a human. 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 hands passed through its hull, scattering silvery pixels. Just another Virtual, Donn realised. 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. But she was a simulation; she could not even touch Rima. The Commissary simply watched, cold, observant. Donn was hot with anxiety and embarrassment.

The Ghost said: ‘I apologise for the intrusion. I am the Sink Ambassador.’

Samm snapped, ‘The
what
?’

‘The Heat Sink, Father,’ 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 Saviour, set in an old generation starship near the heart of the Reef’s three-dimensional tangle of ships – a Silverman, in some kind of trouble.

Commissary Elah faced the Ghost Virtual. ‘Ambassador to the Heat Sink, you call yourself.’

‘Yes.’

‘I take it 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 is no need to call on a mere factor,’ Elah said. ‘I am a Commissary. I represent the Coalition, mankind’s highest authority.’

‘Then it is a good thing that you happen to be here,’ the Ghost said, without a trace of inflection in its artificial voice.

‘And this is all about a bar? A Ghost artefact, in trouble in a bar?’ Elah laughed. ‘How squalid. How absurd. Such a thing could never happen on Earth.’

‘Evidently,’ Eve murmured, ‘this is not Earth. This is not a place where the Coalition’s grip is secure. For this is a place where humans and Ghosts still coexist.’

‘This is stupid,’ Donn said. ‘It’s got nothing to do with Benj.’

‘But we need you,’ the Ambassador said simply. ‘You personally.’

‘Go,’ Samm said. ‘There’s nothing you can do at the
Miriam
, for now. If anything turns up . . .’

‘Mother?’

Rima, her face buried in a handkerchief, waved him away.

So the four of them crowded into the bubble-like transparent hull of the
Susy IV
, Samm Wyman’s ageing flitter: Donn, Elah, the Ghost, and Eve Raoul. Where the Virtuals brushed against the flitter’s hull they crumbled; Eve Raoul brushed stray pixels from her sleeve like flies. Elah had insisted on coming along, as ‘trouble’ of any sort was now the Commission’s business, and so Eve had to come too – that or be shut down, Donn supposed, as Eve seemed tied to Elah, no doubt through some projection system lodged on her person.

You could get from any point to any other on the Reef by walking through the innards of the old ships that comprised this island of life in space, or by walkways and bridges thrown up over the centuries. Donn would have preferred to walk, to burn off some energy. But the
Susy
would be quicker, and so here they were.

The flitter closed up around them, its systems humming, and rose from the Reef of ships into a bowl of stars.

Donn peered down as the Reef opened up beneath them. It was a logjam of ships, a roughly lenticular mass with ragged edges. The Boss was a fierce lantern at the zenith, so that the tangle of superstructures cast complex shadows. Many of the ships, like the
Miriam
, were of the ancient, durable GUTship design, a stalk topped and tailed by lifedome and GUTdrive. But there were more exotic designs, including the old generation starship at the hub of the complex, a frozen ocean of comet ice meant to propel its crew’s descendants to a new world that had never been reached. The Reef was basically a messy human construct. But here and there in its long shadows you could see tangles of silver rope, ships without hulls or bridges or obvious drive units – ships that weren’t of human design at all, Ghost craft.

And today, ships of the Coalition’s Navy hovered over the crowded craft. They were Spline warships, living ships, balls of flesh studded with sensor mounts and weapons emplacements. They rolled like threatening moons, the green tetrahedral sigil of a free mankind tattooed onto their flanks.

Elah lifted her face to the light of the brilliant star that hung over all this. ‘I’ve been stationed here a year already, and I just can’t get used to the sky. Strictly speaking the Boss is catalogued as VI Cygni Number Twelve. Did you know that? Recently it’s been flaring – there’s some remarkable imagery; I can show you if you like. And this particular grouping of stars is called the Cygnus OB2 Association. It’s all so different from what you’d see from Earth. That central monster casts shadows light years long from clouds of interstellar dust, shadows distorted by the finitude of light-speed – quite astonishing.’

Donn was more interested in the cultural side of what she had to say. ‘“Cygnus”? What does that mean?’

Elah waved a hand, dismissive. ‘An old name from Earth. Pre-Occupation. Its meaning is lost.’

Donn had never given much thought to Earth, a place remote in space and in history – or it had been, until the Coalition came. ‘Where is Earth, from here?’

Eve glanced around and pointed. ‘About five thousand nine hundred light years away, thataway. Right around the Galaxy’s spiral arm.’

‘Can you see the Association from Earth?’

‘You’d be able to see the Boss with the naked eye if not for dust clouds in the way.’

‘Humans have travelled far from their origins,’ the Ghost said.

‘You bet we have,’ Elah said with fervour. She pointed at right angles to Earthward. ‘We’re filling up this spiral arm, and we’re heading
that
way – towards the Galaxy Core. We’ve already pushed into the next spiral arm inwards, the Sagittarius Arm.’

The Ghost spoke, its artificial voice sonorous in the enclosed space. ‘And that, of course, is the source of all our trouble.’

Donn knew it was right. For thanks to the explosive expansion of mankind across the face of the Galaxy, suddenly Ghost communities, overwhelmed, had become alien islands stranded in human space.

The Reef had begun as a loose conglomerate of mining and trading groups. As a whole it had moved several times since its formation, embedded hyperdrive engines lifting the whole shebang across light years, always moving further from the Earth, off along the star lanes of the spiral arm. The Cygnus Association had proven a good place for the Reefborn to settle, with plenty of worldlets and asteroids to mine for resources – even a few human colonies, refugees of one calamity or another, to trade with.

And here in the Association the humans of the Reefborn had forged tentative links with the Silver Ghosts, who were undergoing their own expansion out of the heart of the Galaxy. They had even welcomed small Ghost colonies into the Reef itself. You could say that the Reef culture was a composite of human and Ghost, an experiment in cohabitation.

For a time, even after Earth’s new government, the Coalition, had made contact, the Reefborn had profited from trade, being poised on the border between two interstellar empires. There had even been a strange period when autonomous Ghost enclaves had been granted room to live under the new regime: Silver Ghosts living under the nominal authority of the Coalition, a government whose basic ideology was the inevitable victory of mankind.

But times had changed, and the Coalition’s embrace had become harsh.

Those elderly hyperdrive engines had all been confiscated or disabled, for a start, to be refitted into Navy ships. The Reef would never again go jaunting out of human ken into the alien dark. And the Ghosts here had been taxed, marginalised and subjected to discrimination of all kinds. Now, with the crises over the Silvermen and the abductions, the Ghosts’ position was becoming untenable.

And perhaps today, Donn wondered, it was all coming to a head, with himself caught mysteriously in the middle of it.

The
Susy
began its descent back into the forest of ships.

Minda’s Saviour
: the bar announced its name in signs written in several human languages, and Donn had once been shown how the name was inscribed in electromagnetic patterns invisible to human senses but vivid to a Ghost. There was even an image, painted rather than Virtual, of a human girl accepting the gift of a Ghost’s own hide. All this was based on a story three centuries old, that the first contact between humans and Ghosts had involved a young girl who had been saved from freezing by a Ghost sacrificing its own life for hers. But the official Commission line was that the Minda story was just Ghost propaganda.

Inside, the Saviour was basically a bar, selling intoxicating chemicals of various kinds diluted by the ice of a comet that had once orbited Sol. But there was also a kind of mudbath, salty and warm, meant to accommodate Ghost patrons. The light in this corner of the bar came not from the usual hovering light-globes but from glowing ropes draped from the ceiling: Ghost technology.

There was no Ghost in the mudbath today, no Ghost in the bar save the Virtual projection of the Sink Ambassador – and a Silverman, standing like a chromed statue in one corner, confronted by an angry human crowd.

They weren’t actively doing anything to it, not touching or harming it in any way. Yet they surrounded it, sitting silently, defiantly drinking the Navy drink called Poole’s Blood, walling in the Silverman with human flesh. Donn knew some of these people. Here was Bareth Grieve, one of the Reef’s elders, a friend of his mother’s and a member of the Reef’s Grand Council. This morning Grieve and the rest barely acknowledged him. They were just a mob who had trapped a Silverman.

Elah was taller than most in the bar, as indeed was Eve. Donn had heard an insulting theory that Reefborn were becoming dwarfed, as populations stranded on islands often were, apparently. ‘What a spectacle,’ Elah said now, looking down on the group around the Silverman with utter contempt. ‘Makes you ashamed to be human.’

The Ambassador murmured, ‘You can see why we have a problem. These people have been here for hours – and they refuse to release the Silverman.’

Eve said, ‘And something has been done to that Silverman. Look, Donn – can you see?’

At first glance the Silverman was typical of its sort: a kind of sketch of a human figure – head, torso, arms and legs, but shorter than an average human – like a statue in Ghost-hide silver. It lacked detail. It had fingers but no toes, no fingernails, no navel, no genitalia, the face just a bland outline, all orifices sealed up save the eyes and mouth. It was identical to the rest of its kind, just as every Ghost looked the same as every other. But this one had a sort of collar around its neck, of some heavy blue metal.

‘
That
doesn’t look like Ghost technology to me, that collar,’ Eve murmured. ‘That’s human. They’ve done something to this thing. What, though?’ She snapped her fingers, and a data slate appeared in her hands.

‘It is an eerie construct, a Silverman,’ Elah said. ‘Look at it, all but faceless, expressionless, walking among us . . . And if you were going to develop a weapon to penetrate a society like this, an assassin to work in a human environment of rooms and corridors, a human shape is exactly what you would give it. It’s not surprising people are wary, especially in a politically underdeveloped society like this one.’

Donn bridled at her casual insults.

But the Silvermen
were
odd. They had only been appearing on the Reef since the arrival of the Coalition, as relationships between the Ghost and human communities on the Reef had steadily deteriorated. They wandered the Reef’s corridors and haunted its bars and libraries, theatres and forums, even its churches. They stepped out of the way of humans. They would tolerate being touched, their silver flesh poked by curious children. They would speak if spoken to, answer questions if asked, although only of the most direct sort. But they volunteered nothing. They didn’t do anything. They just
looked
.