Xeelee: Endurance (26 page)

The Silvermen were a strange, eerie, uncomfortable presence. And they simply showed up, appearing as suddenly and as randomly as the human abductees disappeared. The Silvermen were anti-abductees.

And they were clearly Ghost artefacts, for that silvery flesh was Ghost hide.

The Sink Ambassador asked, ‘Why are these people doing this?’

‘Maybe this is punishment,’ said Donn. ‘For the abductions. People want something to hit back at.’

‘They are not harming it.’

‘No, but I wouldn’t like being trapped like that. Pinned up against a wall, ignored.’

‘A human sort of harm, then. To learn such lessons is the Silverman’s purpose. So I believe.’

Donn stared at the Ghost. As far as he knew, this was the first time any Ghost had discussed a ‘purpose’ behind the Silverman visitations.

Elah, naturally, had overheard too. ‘It’s here to learn, you say.’

‘I speak at second-hand,’ the Ambassador said. ‘You know that Ghost society is not like yours – not hierarchical – our society is like our bodies, an embracing of diversity. But I believe that the faction behind the Silvermen intends them as an experiment to learn more of humanity.’

‘By sending these homunculi among us as spies,’ Elah said.

‘Not that. The way each of us thinks is shaped by how we sense the universe, how we experience it and manipulate it; we are our bodies as well as our minds. We understand what you are doing,’ it said bluntly to Elah. ‘Your Coalition and the galactic Expansion it is driving. We do not understand
why
you do this. Perhaps your restlessness is something to do with your ape anatomy, your manipulating hands, your heritage of the trees and the savannah.’

Elah laughed. ‘You insult us without even trying, don’t you? So do you think your experiment has worked?’

The Ghost admitted, ‘I don’t believe we anticipated the hostility they have encountered.’

Donn said, looking over at the Silverman, ‘It isn’t human
enough
, perhaps.’

Elah said, ‘In some corners of this Reef people gang up on the Silvermen and dress them up in clothes! All to reduce that feeling of otherness about them. And in other corners the Silvermen are insulted, abused – especially by the families of the abducted. There’s never been a physical attack before, however.’ She faced the Ambassador. ‘If you want us to help you, Ghost, you need to be honest with us.
How
are these homunculi being planted in the Reef? Is it through some teleportation mechanism? And is it the same mechanism that is used to abduct humans from the Reef?’

Again that long hesitation. ‘There is another faction – its motives are noble—’

‘Tell us, Ghost!’

‘Yes,’ it said softly.

Donn blew out his cheeks. ‘I never heard it confirmed before, about the abductions. That the Ghosts really are responsible.’

Elah said stonily, ‘Are you disappointed?’

‘Yes. Because it means all the paranoids were right – all those who swallowed your anti-Ghost propaganda, Commissary.’

‘Don’t push your luck, boy,’ she murmured.

‘It does explain what they’ve done to that wretched Silverman over there,’ Eve said now. ‘I’ve been running some tests.’ She showed them a slate of results that meant little to Donn.

Elah nodded. ‘That collar they stuck on it is full of processors. It’s a sentience booster.’ She smiled at Donn. ‘Do you see? This lynch mob have made the Silverman
smarter
. More self-aware.’

Donn frowned. ‘Is that legal? And,
why
?’

‘I don’t think the law matters much here. And as to why – isn’t it obvious? Yelling at those other dim homunculi was no longer enough to get rid of the rage. They made
this
creature smart enough to understand what it was suffering, what its perceived crime was. And who knows what they have planned for it once this long vigil is done? Can’t you see the logic, Donn Wyman?’

At the sound of Donn’s name, the Silverman turned. It had been the first movement it had made since Donn and the others had walked into the bar. ‘You are Donn Wyman?’

‘Yes,’ said Donn uncertainly.

The Silverman walked straight towards Donn. It had to push through the barrier of drinkers, knocking a couple of men aside. Some of them got to their feet to challenge the Silverman. ‘Don’t you take another step, you Ghost monster—’

But Elah raised her hand, a halting motion. The men glowered, but stood back. The Reefborn had quickly learned to recognise the authority of a Commissary.

The Silverman stood before Donn. It came up to his chest, like a boy dipped in chrome. Even its eyeballs were silvered. ‘We need your help.’ Its voice was identical to the Sink Ambassador’s.

The Ambassador said, ‘This is why I called you here, Donn Wyman. It has been asking for you, specifically. It’s not very articulate, but it does seem to know what it wants.’

‘Sorry,’ said the homunculus.

‘For what?’

‘For this.’ The Silverman reached up and wrapped its arms around Donn’s waist, a powerful, cold, unbreakable hug.

And the bar, the Commissary, the Ghost – all vanished.

No air.

His chest felt as if it would explode.

A raw sky, star-littered. Ice under his feet, hard, sucking the heat out through his thin boots. The Silverman’s face before him, filling his vision, chromed eyes frosting over.

No air! He opened his mouth. Air gushed from his lungs, a shower of crystals. But when he tried to breathe in, there was nothing,
no air.
He was drowning in vacuum. His eyes filmed over. He could not blink. Pain stabbed in his ears.

Still the Silverman held him.

Machinery flashed, a blade, spinning in vacuum silence. The Silverman, cut, shuddered and fell away.

Donn was released. He was still standing. But he was dying, he knew. He tried to call for his mother. He tried to call for Joens Wyman, his lost grandfather in his magic ship, who in stories of his childhood would scoop him up and save him from danger. His vision blackened. He felt himself stagger.

Somebody stood before him. Short, slim, a girl perhaps, wrapped in a silver suit, her visor translucent. She held a weapon, and a mass of silver cloth. She threw the cloth at him. It closed up around him, shutting out the stars.

Air flooded into his lungs. He gasped, and nearly fell. The silver material was squirming around his body, sealing itself up, forming sleeves and leggings. A panel before his face began to clear.

The woman’s face hovered before him. ‘If you want to live, run.’ Her voice whispered in Donn’s ears. She turned away.

He ran, following her. But even as he staggered over the ice, utterly bewildered, the face of the girl stayed in his mind, delicate, beautiful, twisted in a snarl of anger.

His first few steps were like trying to walk in a deflating balloon. But gradually, step by step, it got easier, because the blanket was knitting itself up around him, the seams becoming finer around his limbs, the joints at his hips, knees, shoulders, elbows becoming more flexible. It was unlike any human engineering, silvered on the outside and oddly skin-like on the inside where it was in contact with his clothes, his flesh.

He knew what this was, what it must be. It was the hide of a Silver Ghost. And if he now possessed this hide, then surely there was a Ghost somewhere that lacked it.

He ran on, stumbling.

Wherever he was, gravity was high, a bit higher than the Earth standard maintained by the Reef’s inertial fields. The sky above was black, littered with stars. Most of the light came from one brilliant star directly above his head, a bright pinpoint source. Surely that was the Boss; surely he was still in the Association. It seemed brighter than he remembered, and he thought he saw a splinter of light coming from it, some immense flare. Perhaps he had come closer to the Boss, then, deeper into the Association. But other than that—

He tripped on something, a ledge sticking out of the ice, and fell flat. He lay there, bewildered, winded.

He lifted his head. The girl was running on. Vapour exploded upwards around her, a sparkling fountain with every footfall. ‘Wait,’ he called. ‘Please.’

She ignored him.

He had no choice but to follow her. He dragged himself to his feet. His chest, where he had hit the ground, felt like one vast bruise. He stumbled on.

He came upon structures, just bits of stone wall sticking out above the ice. The remains of a city? There was nothing like a human geometry here, no right angles among these bits of straight line. And he ran through a patch of some softer frost, lying over the water ice that gathered in the lee of the low walls. It sparkled around his footfalls, evidently vaporised by waste heat. When he looked back he saw traces of green in the boot prints, which faded as suddenly as they had come.

He came to a hole in the ground, a well, ragged and dark.

The girl was waiting here. She said, ‘You’ve seen the flowers.’

‘What flowers?’

‘Look at this.’ She lifted something up. It was like a human arm, small, the size of a child’s, with a perfectly formed hand. Done in silver, it was like a bit of a broken statue.

‘It’s the arm of a Silverman,’ he said.

‘Correct. The one that carried you over. The little bastard got away, but I hurt him. Watch this.’ She took a knife from her belt and stabbed the arm, slitting its silver skin from the base of the wrist up through the pit of the elbow to where it had been severed. Then she hauled at the skin, briskly peeling it off. What was exposed was bloody and steaming. Without the containing skin it fell apart into individual creatures, blood-red and worm-like, some of which wriggled feebly, still alive, even as they froze. The girl dropped all this on the ground. A cloud of vapour rose up, quickly freezing to ice and falling back.

And all around the bloody mess, green things blossomed, a kind of moss, what looked like shoots of grass, even a kind of flower that fired off seeds like a miniature cannon. But the heat was evanescent, and the living things quickly shrivelled and died.

‘They wait for a bit of heat. Billions of years if they have to. And when it comes they take their chances. The story of all life, isn’t it?’

‘Who are you?’

‘I don’t have a name.’

He did not recognise her accent. It was flat, toneless. ‘Everybody has a name. My name is Donn Wyman.’

‘I only have the number the fatballs gave me. I am Sample 5A43 Stroke 7J7 Stroke—’

‘We call her Five,’ came a male voice, perhaps somebody down in the well. ‘Quit showing off, Five, and get down here.’

Five grinned at Donn. ‘All right, Hama.’ She kicked apart the bloody mess on the ground and made for the hole, climbing down easily.

Donn saw there were handholds cut into the water-ice wall. He followed with more difficulty, not trusting the grip of his Ghost-hide gloves, which continued to mould themselves around his fingers.

Some way down they came to a membrane, stretched across the well. The girl just dropped through this, so he followed. The membrane opened up around him, clinging closely like the meniscus of some high-surface-tension fluid; it was a tight band passing up the length of his body.

Beneath the membrane he reached the bottom of the well. He was in a kind of cellar, walled by rock – or maybe it was a natural feature, a cave. He had never visited a planet and knew nothing about rock formations. The walls were draped with silvery blankets, what looked like more Ghost hide. On some of them tetrahedrons had been crudely scribbled, the sigil of free mankind. The light came from lengths of silvery, shining cable that had been draped over the walls, crudely nailed into place: Ghost technology, evidently stolen. He saw low corridors cut into the rock, leading off into the dark.

Evidently this was a shelter, a habitat, under the ruins of an alien city.

And there were people here – not many, maybe a dozen. Some wore suits of Ghost hide, their hoods pushed back. Others went naked. They sat in small groups, eating from silvered bowls, or they slept on ledges. One woman nursed an infant at her breast. They were all ages, from the infant up through adulthood to old age. Some glanced incuriously at Donn, standing there in his Ghost-hide suit; others didn’t bother looking around at all.

The girl, Five, stood before him. She had pulled back the hood of her own suit. She rapped at his translucent visor with her fingernail. ‘It’s safe to come out of there. We have warmth and air, thanks to the fatball hide panels.’

‘I don’t know how.’

‘You just pull.’

She took hold of the hide over his cheeks, and hauled. His hood split open easily, sundering right down the middle of his visor. Warm, fuggy air washed over him; he smelled farts and sweat and piss, and a food smell, something like boiled cabbage.

‘Welcome to the rat-hole,’ Five said.

With her help he pulled the rest of his suit away. When he was done, standing there in the clothes he had worn in Minda’s Saviour, a man approached him. He was naked, and Five was stripping down too. The man was short, his head shaved, and his body was scrawny, his ribs showing. He looked like a typical earthworm, Donn thought.

‘I am Hama Belk,’ he said. It was a Coalition accent. ‘You can see we go naked in here.’

‘I think I’ll keep my clothes on, for now.’

Five shrugged. ‘Suit yourself. We don’t wear clothes because the fatballs don’t bother with clothes for their Samples, so there’s none to steal. Unless you feel like robbing a virgin Sample. That’s been known.’ Her face was as hard as her language.

She had short-cropped blonde hair. She was slim, her body wiry and supple; it was hard to tell how old she was – no more than eighteen, nineteen surely. She had obviously been badly damaged, in her short life. Donn felt sorry for her – a ridiculous reaction in the circumstances.

He said, ‘“Steal”? “Rob”? Is that how you live?’

‘This is Ghostworld. We are all escaped Samples.’ She gestured at the nursing mother. ‘Or the children of Samples. We came here with nothing. All we have we steal from the fatballs.’

‘You mean the Ghosts, don’t you? And you steal what – their very hides?’