* * *
Donn watched Five slaughter one Ghost.
Its skin was already punctured where it was snagged on the wire, and bloody water and air fountained, crystalline, from the wounds. Now Five leapt on the Ghost, landing sprawled on its hide. Gripping with her legs, she coiled her back upward and struck down with a stabbing sword, as hard as she could. The blade was buried up to the hilt in the Ghost's carcass. But the hilt was attached by a rope to a stake driven into the hard ground, and as the Ghost thrashed, its own motions tore gouges into its flesh.
Five slid to the ground, then lunged in again. This time she used a tool like a long-handled hook to dig into the gaping wounds, and she dragged out a length of bloody rope, intestine perhaps. It coiled on the ground, steaming and freezing.
All around Donn, the humans labored at the trapped Ghosts with chain saws and axes and swords and daggers. Hama and Kanda worked as hard as the rest. One man thrust a kind of lance into the side of a Ghost. Donn couldn't see its purpose, the wound didn't seem deep, but it thrashed in agony. Kanda told him it was a refrigeration laser, cannibalized from a crashed Ghost ship, invisibly pouring out the Ghost's precious hoarded heat.
Above their heads, even as the slaughter went on, Ghosts fled from the collapsing city, shimmering mercury droplets drifting away.
Five approached Donn. She held out the knife to him, handle first. "Here. Finish this one. Easy first kill, my treat."
Donn took a step forward, toward the Ghost she had eviscerated. He actually held out his hand, holding the knife. He knew this was the only way he was going to survive here.
But all the emotions, all the shock of this extraordinary day, focussed into this moment. He felt detached from the ice world, from the grinning girl before him, detached from it by more than the smear of frozen blood on his Ghost-hide visor.
He stepped back. "No," he said.
She glared at him. She took back the knife and cut through the Ghost's intestine with a savage swipe. Dark fluid poured out, congealing onto the ice, freezing immediately. The Ghost subsided, as if deflating. Five faced Donn. "I knew you were a weak one the minute I saw you."
"Then you were right."
"We only survive here by killing Ghosts. If you won't kill, you have no right to live."
"I understand that."
She held out her hand. "Your suit. Give it back to me. I'll find a better use for it."
He nodded. He had nothing else to say. He reached up and pinched his hood by the cheeks. One firm tug and-
"Wait."
A human being came walking out of the calamitous Ghost city-walking without a pressure suit, of Ghost skin or otherwise. It was Eve Raoul. And a Ghost rolled at her shoulder. It was the Sink Ambassador, Donn knew it must be.
The humans, Hama and Kanda and the rest, stood back from their butchery. They were crusted with frozen blood, weapons in their hands.
Trembling, exhausted, Donn felt irritated. It could all have been over in an instant. No more changes, no more transitions, no more choices. Death would have been easier, he felt, than facing whatever came next.
* * *
Around them, the Ghosts were starting to organize.
"We can still get out of here," Five said, "if we run. Now."
"No more running for me," Donn said. "Whatever happens."
"That's wise, Donn Wyman," said the Ambassador.
Eve Raoul stood at its side. She looked down at her feet, up to her ankles in frozen air. The Virtual protocol violations must be agonizing for her, Donn thought; it was supposed to hurt if you walked out into the vacuum without a suit. She turned to the Ambassador. "I did the job you wanted. I snagged their attention." Yes, Donn thought. As no Ghost, among a million Ghosts, ever could. "Let me go now. Please."
"Thank you, Eve Raoul."
Eve turned to Donn. "Listen to the Ambassador. Do what it says. It's more important than you can imagine." Her voice trailed off, and she broke up into a cloud of blocky pixels that dwindled and vanished.
Donn said, "How did you know I would be here?"
"You are not hard to track," the Ambassador said. "Your biochemical signature-none of you can hide. Not even you, Sample 5A43."
Five flinched. "You know where we are, our bunker?"
"Of course we do."
"Then why don't you hunt us down, kill us?"
"For what purpose? We brought you here to understand you, not kill you."
Hama said, a knife in his hand, "Perhaps seeing humans in the wild like this helps you understand a bit more, eh, Ambassador?"
Kanda said, "You do not stop us even when we come to slaughter you?"
The Ambassador lifted off the ground and hovered over the deflated corpses of its kind, impaled on the crude human traps. "We seem to have trouble anticipating such actions as this. We do not think the way you do. I suppose we lack imagination."
Donn said, "What do you want, Ambassador? Will you take me home?"
"Not yet." It was another voice. A Silverman came walking from the chaotic city-the Silverman, Donn saw, the one from Minda's Savior, with its human-tech neck band and one arm lopped off above the elbow. "We need your help."
" 'We?' Ambassador, since when have you and the Silvermen constituted a 'we'?"
"Since you made this one as smart as any Ghost. You Reefborn made him intelligent enough to suffer. But sentience always has unexpected consequences. In fact, he has been intelligent enough, and human enough, to be able to anticipate what humans will do next."
"Do?"
"When you learn what we have been up to. Donn Wyman, we need you to tell the humans. They would not listen to us. You, though, might be believed. We will show you. Come."
The Silverman turned and walked back toward the city. The Ambassador followed.
Donn saw that they were heading for the dodecahedral transfer station. "You want me to get into that thing?"
"Yes," said the Ambassador.
"Where will it take me?"
"To somewhere beyond your imagination."
"And what will I meet there?"
"The one known in your human rumors as the Seer."
Kanda laughed. "You lucky cuss. Go, man. Go!"
But still Donn hesitated. "I'll come with you if you let these others go. Back to their cave under the ice. And send them home. Don't harm them further."
The Ambassador didn't pause. "Done."
"Thank you," whispered Hama Belk.
Kanda grinned. "A brief life, Hama?"
"Not that brief, thanks."
Donn said, "One more thing, Ambassador."
The Ambassador rolled. 'Jack Raoul would have admired your nerve."
"Find my brother. Benj Wyman. He's here somewhere, one of your 'Samples.' "
"Not mine. The faction who—"
Donn cut him off. "Find him. Send him home, too."
"Done."
"All right." Donn took a step toward the Ambassador.
"Wait." It was Five. "Take me with you, virgin. If you're to meet the Seer, I want to be there."
"Why? To kill it?"
"If it's necessary, you'll need somebody to do it. You won't, that's for sure."
Donn asked, "Ambassador?"
The Ambassador rolled. "Abandon your weapons, Sample 5A43."
"Five. My name is Five."
"Abandon your weapons."
Five was obviously reluctant. But she took her heavy projectile weapon and her quiver of arrows and her stabbing sword and handed them all to Hama.
Donn held out his hand to her. "Come, then. But no more of the 'virgin.'"
She clasped his hand; he could feel her strength through the double layer of Ghost fabric. They walked together, following the Silverman and the Ambassador, back into the devastated city.
* * *
The flow of Ghosts into the dodecahedral transport terminal had stopped, perhaps disrupted by the chaos the humans had caused. But Ghosts were still pouring out of the crumpled heart of the city, while more were flowing the other way,
as a purposeful operation of recovery began. Donn found it hard not to flinch, as if all these suspended masses might come tumbling down on his head. The Ambassador assured them they would be safe.
Five's gloved hand grasped Donn's hard.
Donn asked, "So how are you feeling?"
"Like I'm two years old again," she said. "Stripped of everything I've built for myself. They've got me back, haven't they?"
"No," Donn said firmly. "You walked into this-your choice. And you'll be walking back out of it, too."
She thought about that. "You promise, virgin?"
"I promise." And you were wrong, Hama, he thought. I did get to save her after all-or at least there's chance. "So, Ambassador. This device—is this how you've been snatching people?"
"Shall we avoid such loaded words, Donn Wyman? We have been developing a new nonlocal transportation technology. It is the outcome of a wide-ranging program of physical research."
The Ghosts' origin, under a failing sun, had led them to believe they lived in a flawed universe. So they wished to understand its fine-tuning.
"Why are we here?You see, there is only a narrow range of the constants of physics within which life of any sort is possible. We study this question by pushing at the boundaries-by tinkering with the laws that sustain and contain us all. Thus we explore the boundaries of reality."
"While snatching children," Five said.
"Get to the point, Ambassador," Donn said.
"We have found a way to adjust the value of Planck's constant, which gives, in human physics, the scale of quantum uncertainty."
Donn frowned. "Jack Raoul was involved in a situation where Ghosts messed with Planck's constant. They reduced it."
"Yes. We were endeavoring to produce an AI of arbitrarily large capacity."
"It was a disaster."
"Well, yes. But in the end, a useful technology was derived-Ghost hide, as you call it."
Five was struggling to follow all this. "And is this what you've done here? You've decreased this Planck number again?"
"No. This time we have increased it, Five."
Donn saw it. "You've increased the uncertainty in the universe—or a bit of it." He thought fast. "A particle has a quantum function, which describes the probability you'll find it in any given location. But the probability is nonzero everywhere, throughout the universe. And if you increase Planck, then you increase all those probabilities."
"You're beginning to see it," the Ambassador said. "It is hard to imagine a more elegant mode of transport, in theory: you simply make it more likely that you are at your destination than your starting point."
Donn was stunned by this audacity. "In theory."
"The engineering details are soluble."
Donn laughed. "Evidently. Or we wouldn't be standing here, would we?"
" 'Soluble.'
'Evidently' " Five stared at Donn. "You're talking to this Ghost as if all this is normal. As if you're discussing a new kind of stabbing sword." She turned to the Ambassador. "How do you change the laws of physics?"
"Quagma," said Donn immediately.
He understood some of this. The principle of the GUTdrive, which powered ancient ships like his mother's own Miriam Berg, was related. Quagma was the state of matter that had emerged from the big bang, a magma of quarks—a quagma. And at such temperatures, the fundamental forces of physics unified into a single superforce. Quagma was bound together only by the superforce. And when quagma was allowed to cool and expand, the superforce decomposed into the four sub-forces. By controlling the decomposition, you could select the ratios between those forces, ratios that governed the fundamental constants—including Planck's constant.
Humans knew the importance of quagma. Donn's father's family had a legend of an earlier Wyman involved in a jaunt nearly two hundred years ago, when humans had raced Ghosts to retrieve a lode of this primordial treasure.
Donn said, "You scare us, with what you do, you Ghosts. You always have and always will."
The Ghost rolled and bobbed. "Sometimes we scare ourselves, believe it or not. Shall we proceed?" And it swept boldly into the open dodecahedral chamber. Doors dilated closed around it, and when they opened, only a second later, the Ghost had gone, a tonne of spinning flesh vanished.
Donn and Five were left alone, surrounded by anonymous shoals of Ghosts. Donn grabbed Five's hand again. "Together?"
"Let's get on with it."
The chamber was a blank-walled box, silvered like all Ghost architecture. When the doors closed behind them, they were suspended in the dark, just for a heartbeat.
And when the doors opened, they were not in the dark anymore.
"Do not be afraid," said the Sink Ambassador.
* * *
The Ghost hovered before them, bathed in dazzling light. Behind it Donn saw the silent figure of the Silverman, the stump of its severed arm a jarring asymmetry.
Five squeezed Donn's hand. "Virgin?"
"It's all right. I mean, if they were going to kill us, they'd have done it by now. And stop calling me 'virgin.' Come on." Deliberately, he stepped forward, into the light. Keeping tight hold of his hand, Five followed.
Donn found himself standing on a silvered platform, three or four meters across. The Ghost hovered before him. He couldn't see any support for the platform, though gravity felt about normal. They were entirely bathed in pure white light, above, below, all around, an abstraction of a sky. The light was bright, not quite dazzling. And as Donn's eyes adjusted, he gradually made out structure in the light: billows like clouds, all around, slowly evolving, vacuoles boiling.
When he glanced back, he saw that the dodecahedral transit chamber had vanished; somehow he wasn't surprised.
The Ambassador said, "Where do you think you are?"
"In the heart of a star," Five said. "Where else?"
"But not just any star."
"The Boss," Donn said. "But that's impossible. Isn't it, Ambassador?"
"How did you phrase it earlier? 'Evidently not. Or we wouldn't be standing here, would we?' "
The Silverman said, "I understand, Donn Wyman. I am human enough to fear falling. Don't be afraid. Step to the edge. Look down."
Five wouldn't move. She stood there, her hide suit still stained by Ghost blood, bathed in starlight. But Donn stepped to the rim of the floating disk.
And he looked down on a Ghost base in the heart of the star. It was a hollowed-out moon, a rock ball that must have been a thousand kilometers wide, riddled with passages and cavities.
The disk began to descend. The motion was smooth, but Five lunged forward and grabbed at Donn's arm.
The moon turned into a complex, machined landscape below them. Ghost ships and science platforms swept over the pocked landscape, tangles of shining net. And Ghosts themselves drifted up from the chambers and machine emplacements, bobbing like balloons, shining in the star's deep light. Behind the moon, there were threads of a more intense brightness, just at the limit of visibility, dead straight. All over the moon's surface, vast cylindrical structures gleamed. The Ambassador said these were intrasystem drives and hyperdrives, systems that had been used to fling this moon into the body of this star and to hold it here.
And there was quagma down there, the Ambassador said, little packets of the primordial stuff, buried in the pits of ancient planetesimal craters. I knew it, Donn thought.
"The work here is hard," the Ambassador said. "Often lethal. We have poured workers into this mine of light endlessly." And Donn thought of the stream of Ghosts he had seen filing patiently into the transportation booth on Ghostworld. "Few come back, despite all our precautions. But now the work is nearly done."
Five asked, "So how come we aren't all burned up? We're in the middle of a star.'"
"Perhaps you can see those illuminated threads? Those are refrigeration lasers. By making ourselves hotter even than this star's core, we can dump our heat into it. Of course, what you are seeing is a representation, heavily processed. Starstuff is i
n fact very opaque."
Donn said, "You are messing with physics again, aren't you, Ambassador?" He thought back to the Coalition's recent observations of the Boss. "We've been observing flares. Are you trying to mend the star, to stop the flares? No, not that. Sink Ambassador, are you destabilizing this star?"
The Ambassador rolled. "How would Jack Raoul have put it? 'Guilty as charged.' What do you understand of stellar physics?"
Every star was in equilibrium, with the pressure of the radiation from its fusing core balancing the tendency of its outer layers to fall inward under gravity. A giant star like the Boss, crushed by its own tremendous weight, needed a lot of radiation to keep from imploding. So it ran through the hydrogen fuel it used to fuse quickly, and a detritus of helium ash collected in its core.
"But that 'ash' can fuse too," the Ambassador said. "The fusion process produces such elements as carbon, oxygen, silicon, each of which fuses in turn. The chain ends in iron, which cannot fuse, for if it did so it would absorb energy, not release it. And so an inner core of iron builds up at the heart of a star like this. A core bigger than most worlds, Donn Wyman!"
Five asked, "So how come it doesn't just collapse?"
"Its components are already crushed together as far as they will go. This is a property of atomic matter. Humans know it as the Pauli exclusion principle. Of course, in time, as the dead zone spreads through the heart of the star, the repulsion will finally be overcome. Electrons will be forced to merge with protons, producing neutrons-a neutron star will be born, smaller and denser than the iron core. And then there will be a collapse of the outer layers, a catastrophic one. But not yet, not for a long time; this star is stable."
"Or it was, before you came along," Donn said. "But now you're changing things, aren't you? Planck's constant again?"
"Jack Raoul would be proud of you, Donn. Like you, he was a good guesser."
"If you were to use your moon-machine to reduce Planck in the star's core—"
"Then Pauli repulsion would be reduced. The iron core would collapse prematurely."
The Ghost showed them a Virtual representation of what would happen next. The implosion would rapidly mutate into an explosion. Shock waves would form and rebound from the inner layers, and a vast pulse of neutrinos would power further expansion.
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