Xeelee: Endurance (27 page)

Five snapped, ‘We have a way of things here, virgin. You were saved by a Ghost hide. Now you must save in turn. You must kill a fatball and strip it of its hide, when you get the chance. Carry it with you, and save another if you can.’

He recoiled. ‘I
work
with Ghosts. Look, my name is Donn Wyman. I work as a factor on the Reef – that is, I develop trading relationships with the Ghosts. Perhaps I—’

‘I don’t care what you do, or did. None of that matters now, your old life. You’ve died and been reborn. Now you’re just another Sample, like us. You don’t even have a number, as I do, since you weren’t processed by the Ghosts before you were liberated.’

‘Samples. Numbers.’ Donn saw it now. ‘This, wherever I am, is where you go when you’re abducted.’

‘You’ve got it,’ Hama Belk said. ‘Just as the snatching is random, so is the depositing. Usually you end up in a processing chamber, surrounded by a thousand Ghosts. That’s what happened to me before the rats busted me out. Others end up on the surface, exposed – evidently the transfer isn’t a hundred per cent reliable. There are places where the strays end up, and we wait for them, with blankets; that’s how Five found you.’

‘How does it work, this transfer, the snatching?’

‘Well, we don’t know,’ Hama said. ‘Does it matter?’

‘And those exposed on the surface—’

‘They die, if they aren’t found in a heartbeat by Ghost patrols, or by us rats.’

‘Rats?’

‘Us,’ said Five. ‘Wild humans, living in the cracks. Though I personally have never seen a rat, I understand the concept.’

‘How come you haven’t seen a rat? Never mind. Have you heard of Benj Wyman? My brother. He was abducted only hours before me—’

‘No,’ Five said bluntly.

‘Look,’ Donn said, ‘you can see there’s been some kind of mix-up. I’m not an abductee, a Sample as you call them. I came here with a Silverman. You saw it. You cut its arm off! Maybe if you hadn’t chased it off – if I could talk to it—’

Five laughed in his face. ‘Every virgin Sample says the same thing. “I’m not supposed to be here. I’m special, I’m a mother or a father, I have this-or-that back home.”’

‘How do I get back?’

She just laughed at him again. She walked away, and knelt down by the nursing mother.

All at once, the hardness of her manner, the shock of all his experiences that day, hit Donn. He staggered, and stumbled back against the wall.

Hama grabbed his arm. ‘Here. Sit down. Look, there’s a ledge.’ He handed Donn a silver bowl. ‘Try to eat some of this. It’ll warm you up.’

‘It’s just so sudden.’ He looked at Hama. ‘I hadn’t even taken in my own brother’s abduction. And now—’

‘Well, you’ve plenty of time to get used to it. Take the bowl.’ It contained a brownish sludge, like a thick soup.

Donn dipped a cautious finger in the bowl and tasted the gloop. It was lukewarm and tasted faintly of mushrooms. ‘More Ghost technology?’

‘Yes. We just scrape up the green shit from our footsteps outside and drop it in. This is how they feed the Samples. Here, your ears are bleeding.’ He handed Donn a scrap of cloth.

Donn dabbed at his ears; the cloth came away bloody. ‘I don’t even know where I am.’

Hama shrugged. ‘None of us do. We’re obviously still in the Association. And this is obviously a rogue planet, far from any sun. But aside from that we can’t tell. After all, as Five said, nobody’s ever been back to tell the tale. We just call it “Ghostworld”.’

Donn nodded. ‘It seems like a typical Ghost colony world, from what I know of them.’

‘Yes. We were taught all about Ghosts in our training, on the way here in the Spline ships . . .’

The Ghosts’ world was once Earth-like: blue skies, a yellow sun. But as the Ghosts climbed to awareness their sun evaporated, killed by a companion pulsar. The oceans froze and life huddled inward; there was frantic evolutionary pressure to find ways to keep warm. And the only way to do that was through cooperation.

‘That’s the story,’ Hama said. ‘Though many of us in the Commission wonder if this is true, or just some kind of creation myth. Or propaganda. Certainly the thing we call a Silver Ghost really is a community of symbiotic creatures: an autarky, a miniature biosphere in its own right, all but independent of the universe outside. Even the skin that saved you is independently alive.’

‘Even when you take it from the Ghost, it lives on.’

‘I wouldn’t be judgemental,’ Hama said evenly. ‘I myself was a clerk in the Commission for Historical Truth, working on the re-education of the Reef population. I come from Mercury, actually, a sister planet of Earth. I hadn’t been on the Reef long before the lottery of the Sampling picked me. But none of that matters now.’ He looked at his hands. ‘All I have here is myself, and those around me. And I do what I must, to stay alive.’

‘Why do they bring us here? Why the Samples?’

Hama eyed him. ‘You said you worked with Ghosts. You don’t know?
I
think it’s because they are trying to understand us, the Ghosts. They fear us, for right now our Third Expansion is overwhelming them. But you can’t defeat what you don’t understand.’

‘So they take us for study.’ Donn shook his head. ‘But these random abductions, of a child from a mother, a father from a daughter – my own brother was taken. The Ghosts couldn’t antagonise us more if they tried.’

‘I guess that shows how little they understand us, yes?’

‘And what about Five, the girl with no name?’

‘Ah. She was taken as an infant, under two years old I think. As she grew she was surrounded only by Ghosts. The only human she saw was her own reflection in the hide of a Ghost. She grew up thinking she was some kind of deformity, a mutant, disabled Ghost.

‘Eventually a rat pack broke into her cage. She thought they were as diseased as she was. I think she was raped. She was only thirteen, fourteen. What a welcome to humanity! Somehow she came through that, and emerged as a functioning human being – I say functioning – all she knows is this, life as a rat, and all she wants to do is kill Ghosts.’ He smiled. ‘She’s inventive about it, though.’

Donn watched Five with the mother. ‘I’ll be wary.’

‘Yes, do. Don’t get any foolish ideas of
saving
her. And there are worse. Rat packs that prey on humans, other Samples. Even at the moment of abduction.’

Donn looked at him curiously. ‘And what do you want, Hama?’

‘I came to the Association to save
you
, Donn. I mean, all of you on the Reef, living in non-Doctrinal ignorance out here in the dark. If all I can do is live here as if in a guerrilla cell behind the lines, killing a few Ghosts before my short life is over – well, maybe that’s enough. It is my duty to die.
A brief life burns brightly.
That is the slogan of the Third Expansion of mankind.’

Donn said carefully, ‘I think I’m more afraid of you than the feral girl over there.’

Hama laughed.

Five came to stand over Hama and Donn. Naked, lithe, her body was a pale streak in the silvery light, her nipples hard, her pubic hair a blonde tuft. ‘Rested, are you? We’re mounting a raid. You’re lucky, Donn Wyman. We’ve been planning this one for a while; you’ll be there for the pay-off.’

Donn made to protest. ‘I only just got here. I need to find my brother – the Silverman—’

But she was already walking away.

Hama nudged him. ‘That wasn’t a request. Come on, on your feet.’

Donn struggled up, his chest still aching from his fall.

A party of a dozen adults suited up.

They clambered up through the airtight membrane into the spectral stillness of the landscape. Donn was shocked that the Boss had shifted in the sky, moving away from the zenith, and the shadows it cast were long. Donn had never before seen a sunset, or a dawn; this was a planet, not an artifice like the Reef.

They checked each other’s suits, and were handed weapons. Donn was astonished to be given a spear. Then, following Five’s lead, they set off over the ice.

The weapons were mostly crude – spinning blades mounted on poles, or even more primitive than that, daggers and swords, pikes and spears, lengths of barbed wire and ugly tangles of spikes and hooks. But there were a few more sophisticated instruments – a kind of projectile weapon like a bazooka, even what looked like a Qax-era gravity-wave handgun, much repaired, polished smooth by usage.

They carried these weapons, walking to war.

‘I can’t believe we’re doing this,’ Donn said, to nobody in particular. ‘We’re like pre-industrial savages.’

‘I know how you feel,’ said a woman walking beside him. ‘I was a food technician, back on the Reef. I’m the nearest thing to a biologist this little crew has. And a doctor. But by day I’m a spear-carrier . . .’ Brisk, purposeful, she was perhaps forty; she might once have been plump, but now the skin of her cheeks and neck sagged, as if emptied. ‘My name’s Kanda Fors, by the way.’

‘I am—’

‘We all heard who you are.’ She smiled, a dogged sort of expression. ‘We like to act indifferent. I guess that’s to do with Five’s hold over us. But wait until she’s asleep. We’ll all be at you then, finding out what you know of home, our families. We only get news from Samples. And it’s all one way.’

With her calm Reef accent she was more like Donn’s family than anybody else he had yet met here. ‘This is real, isn’t it?’ he said slowly. ‘I think maybe I’m working through some kind of shock.’ He looked at the spear he had been given. It was clearly improvised from some ripped-off bit of equipment, not much more than a steel rod with its tip laboriously sharpened. ‘I really am stuck here, at the wrong end of a one-way funnel to this shithole in the ice.’

Hama Belk said, ‘It isn’t so bad here. It’s not just a scramble for survival, you know. We’re still human. We can still have higher goals.’

‘Like what?’

‘Like science,’ Kanda said. ‘At least we can observe what’s around us. There is life here, for instance.’

‘I saw it. In my footsteps.’

‘That’s what survives.’

She said that this rogue world must have been detached from its parent star, by a close stellar encounter perhaps, or a gravitational slingshot by a wandering Jovian.

‘Any civilisation would have been smashed quickly, by the quakes, the tides, even before the oceans froze over, water ice setting hard as rock. And then the air itself froze out on top of that. But there is life here, still. You saw it in your footsteps. And,’ she said dreamily, ‘there is
other
life. A more exotic sort, blown in from the stars, cold-lovers, psychrophiles, colonising this cold world . . .’

‘Psychrophiles?’

‘Watch.’ She took the index finger of her left hand in her right, and squeezed the fingertip of her Ghost-hide glove. A seam broke, and ice crystals gushed out into the vacuum. She bent and pressed this breach to the frozen ground, just for a second. Then she pulled back her hand and let the glove seal itself up. ‘Ouch, that’s enough, I can do without frostbite. Now, look.’

Where she had touched, a pit opened up in the ground, the width of a fist, the lip pulling back as if recoiling. The little pit closed up again in a couple of seconds. But when Kanda stirred it with a fingertip, it was broken up, like dust. ‘See that? Ice, permafrost, even rock, broken up to powder.’

‘What’s going on?’

Kanda grinned. ‘Cryo-panspermia bugs.’

There were ways that even terrestrial life could survive at extremely low temperatures. There was always the odd scrap of liquid water even in the coldest ice, in brine pockets perhaps, or in nano-films, kept from freezing through pressure contact. And even on this frozen world there were nutrients, seeping up from the planet’s core, or drifting down from space, comet dust.

‘At these temperatures you can’t be ambitious,’ Kanda said. ‘You don’t reproduce – well, hardly ever. You don’t even aim to grow much, just repair a bit of cellular damage once every millennium or so. Chemistry can be a help. There is a gloopy, starch-like material called exopolymer that has a way of preventing the formation of ice crystals. To such creatures, even the Ghosts are refugees from a warmer regime, balls of liquid water, like lava monsters. There’s a whole ecosphere here, Donn, that we know hardly anything about. I long to come back here some day and do some proper science . . .’

‘“Science”,’ Donn repeated. ‘While we march to war.’

Kanda frowned. ‘Listen, Donn Wyman. You’d better take our miserable little war seriously. Whatever the future of mankind,
we
need the resources we steal from the Ghosts, or we’d die. Simple as that. So when Five tells you to fight, fight. We don’t have a lot of spare capacity for passengers. Of course she can hear every word we say.’

Five turned. ‘Yes, though at least the Ghosts cannot hear your pointless babbling. Ever trained to fight a Ghost?’

‘No.’ The very thought shocked Donn.

‘The easiest way to bring him down is just to puncture his hide, and follow the trail of excrement and blood and heat until he dies, which might take a day or two. We’ll show you how to skin a fatball later.’

‘You’re a monster,’ Donn blurted.

‘No. I’m alive.’ She smiled at him, her beauty dazzling.

After perhaps an hour’s walking, only a few kilometres, they crested a frozen ridge. And here Five had them hunch down and approach more cautiously.

So Donn got his first glimpse of a Ghost city. Sprawled over a valley carved by some long-frozen river, it was a forest of globes and halfglobes draped in a chrome netting. The colony lacked a clear centre, and there was no simple geometry; it looked as if it had grown in place, and perhaps it had. A slim tower dominated, silvered like the rest, with a sharp electric-blue light pulsing at its summit.

Ghosts streamed everywhere, following their own enigmatic business, like droplets of silver blood flowing through the open carcass of their silver city. The Boss cast highlights from every hide, so that the city gleamed, as if it had been scattered with diamonds.

Five grinned at Donn. ‘So what do you think of your prey, hunter?’

‘I’m no hunter. I’m surprised we’re so close to a city.’