Galactic Empires

by Gardner R. Dozois

  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 genera
tion 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."

  "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 it's all about a bar. A Ghost artifact in trouble in a bar," Elah said. She laughed. "How squalid. How absurd. Such a thing could never happen on Earth."

  "Evidently," Eve murmured, "this is not Earth."

  "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…"

  "Mom?"

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

  * * *

  So the four of them crowded into the bubblelike transparent hull of the Suzy IV, Samm Wyman's aging flitter: Donn, Elah, the Ghost, and Eve Raoul. Where the Virtuals brushed against the Hitter's hull, they crumbed; Eve Raoul brushed stray pixels from her sleeve like flies.

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

  So the flitter closed up around them, its systems humming, and rose from the Reef of ships like a stone thrown up 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, entirely lacking in symmetry. 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. Here and there in the long shadows of the Reef, 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.

  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 cataloged 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 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 lightspeed—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. PreOccupation. 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 traveled far from their origins," the Ghost said.

  "You bet we have," Elah said with fervor. She pointed at right angles to Earthward. "We're filling up this spiral arm, and we're heading that way-toward the Galaxy Core. We've already pushed into the next spiral arm inward, 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. Thanks to the explosive expansion of mankind, suddenly the Ghost communities scattered around the Association, including the enclaves in the Reef itself, had become alien islands stranded in human space.

  The Reef as a whole had moved several times since its formation, embedded hyperdrive engines lifting the whole shebang across light-years, always moving further from Earth, off along the star lanes of the spiral arm. The Association had proven a good place to live, 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 the Reefborn had forged tentative links with the Silver Ghosts, who were undergoing their own expansion out of the heart of the Galaxy They 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 the Coalition had made contact, the Reefborn had profited from trade between two interstellar empires. There had been a strange period when autonomous Ghost enclaves had been granted room to live under the new regime: Silver Ghosts, living under Coalition authority.

  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 had been taxed, marginalized, and suffered discrimination of all kinds.

  With the crises over the Silvermen and the abductions, the Ghosts' position was becoming untenable. And perhaps, Donn thought, it was all coming to a head, with himself caught mysteriously in the middle of it.

  The Suzy began its descent into the forest of infrastructure.

  * * *

  Minda's Savior: the bar announced its name in signs written in several human languages, and some nonhuman. 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 young human girl accepting the gift of its very hide from a hovering Ghost. 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 Savior 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 mud bath, 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 rope draped from the ceiling, Ghost technology.

  There was no Ghost in the mud bath today, no Ghost in the bar save the Virtual projection of the Sink Ambassador. Only the 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, with utter contempt. "Makes you ashamed to be human."

  The Ambassador murmured, "You can see why we have a problem. They've been like this for hours."

  Eve said, "Something has been done to mat 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 humanlike 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 as 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.