Xeelee: Endurance

by Stephen Baxter

  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.’

  Hama shrugged. ‘We are all escapees from the Sample zoos in that city, or else we were teleported to the ice nearby.’

  Five said, ‘Actually, everywhere on this world is near a Ghost city. The planet is filthy with fatballs, billions or trillions, swarming.’

  That electric-blue light winked mournfully. ‘What’s the tower?’

  ‘Well, we don’t know,’ Hama said. ‘Best guess is, it’s a Destroyer tower. The Commission knows of such things on other Ghost worlds.’

  ‘Destroyer?’

  ‘In ancient times, on their home world, the Ghosts’ ancestors understood full well that a rogue pulsar was destroying their sun. So they venerated the pulsar. They made it a god.’

  Kanda murmured, ‘Actually it’s fascinating. Humans have always worshipped gods who they believed created the world. The Ghosts worship the one that destroyed it.’

  ‘Quiet,’ hissed Five. ‘This talk is purposeless.’

  ‘Talking is what people do, child,’ said Kanda.

  ‘We are not people. We are rats. We are here to fight, not to talk.’

  Donn looked down at the extraordinary, beautiful city in dismay. ‘Fight for what? Resources? Hides, equipment—’

  ‘That,’ Five said, ‘and the destruction of the Seer.’

  Donn frowned. ‘What do you know of the Seer?’

  ‘Not much more than you do on your Reef,’ Hama said.

  Five said, ‘The Ghosts talked of it, when I was in their zoos, when they thought I could not understand. Those who dealt with me were far from the centres of power. Yet it exists.’

  ‘So what is it?’

  ‘We don’t know,’ said Hama. ‘But if the chance arises to destroy it, we should take it. The Coalition’s forces have learned that Ghost concentrations are hard to defeat, short of out-and-out genocide. They lack hierarchies, like human societies, which makes them impossible to decapitate. Usually assassinations are useless. It’s like stabbing a pool of mercury with a fork; it just fragments and runs away. But in this particular case you have this Seer, whatever it is, a source of power. So if we could get to that we could indeed inflict a great defeat in this war.’

  ‘We’re not at war,’ Donn said.

  ‘Oh yes we are.’

  Five whispered, ‘Let’s move in.’ She waved them forward.

  Donn approached the Ghost city, running at a crouch from one bit of cover to the next, watching the silvered backs of his companions running ahead – silvered as the city itself was silvered, for their suits were made of the same stuff.

  The city itself loomed huge before them now, a sculpture park of mirrored monuments that hovered off the ground, utterly still. Light rope trailed everywhere, linking one floating building to the next, and filling the whole with a silver-grey glow. And Donn heard music. The ground throbbed with a bass harmonisation, as if he could hear the heartbeat of the frozen planet.

  Five raised a hand to call a halt. They were at the head of a kind of thoroughfare that led into the heart of the city, reasonably clear, reasonably straight. Now the rats got to work, laying barbed wire and spiky obstacles across the smooth surface of the roadway.

  Donn murmured to Kanda, ‘What are we doing?’

  ‘Setting traps,’ she replied. ‘Ghosts don’t follow human ideas of geography, you know that. But if they need to evacuate fast, they’ll use thoroughfare
s like this. In fact, they come swarming along the ground when they’re alarmed. Some primitive instinct, but useful for us. They’ll hit the traps.’

  ‘What is going to make them evacuate?’

  Five grinned at him. ‘We are. Come on.’

  Leaving half a dozen hunters behind at the barricade, the rest moved deeper into the city.

  The crowded net of light ropes grew thicker over their heads. In the complexity Donn saw denser concentrations – nurseries of Ghost sub-components, perhaps, or control centres, or simply areas where Ghosts lived and played – little more than patches of silvery shadow in the tangle. It was characteristic Ghost architecture, vibrant, complex, beautiful, alive, totally inhuman.

  And there were Ghosts all over. They drifted over and through the tangle, following pathways invisible to Donn, or they would gather in little clusters, sometimes whirling in chains like necklaces, apparently for the fun of it.

  The rats clung to the shadows, out of sight, and Donn followed their example.

  In one place Donn saw an orderly queue of Ghosts, almost like a line of human schoolchildren waiting for a punishment. They filed patiently into a floating dodecahedral box that opened to embrace each Ghost, closed around it, and opened again, empty, ready for the next. There must have been thousands of Ghosts in the patient line, he saw. And as the dodecahedral chamber hovered, far from any building, it was hard to see where all the Ghosts it swallowed were going to.

  He pointed this out to Hama. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘I suppose there are two possible answers,’ Hama said drily. ‘I don’t believe it’s an extermination chamber. Maybe it’s a teleport.’

  The thought excited Donn. ‘Like the Sampling, the abductions. So where are they going?’

  ‘We only have rumours,’ Hama said cautiously. ‘Briefings from the Commission before we were abducted, gossip from inside the Ghosts’ zoos . . . It may have something to do with the Seer.’

  ‘Or,’ Kanda said, ‘it may have to do with the instability of the star. The Boss – all that flaring. Maybe the Ghosts are trying to mend a failing star . . . That would be their style.’

  The thought staggered Donn.

  ‘We know they think big,’ Hama said. ‘Anyhow it makes no difference to us . . .’

  Donn stared at the chamber, avid. For if this was a teleport terminal, it might be a way off this dismal planet. But the dodecahedral chamber wasn’t their destination, and they passed on.

  The party came to a big transparent sphere, apparently pressurised. At the centre of the sphere a big ball of mud hung in the air, brown and viscous. It seemed to be heated from within; it was slowly boiling, with big sticky bubbles of vapour crowding its surface, and it was laced with purple and red smears. Tubes led off from the mud ball to the hull of the spherical pod. Ghosts clustered there, sucking up the purple gunk from the mud.

  Donn crouched with the others, awed. ‘The Ghosts are feeding.’

  ‘Yes,’ Kanda said. ‘This is how Ghosts live. Even on their home world, deep beneath their frozen oceans, a little primordial geothermal heat must leak out still, dragging minerals up from the depths. Down there, life forms feed, blind, pale. And the Ghosts feed on them.’

  So this mud ball was a kitchen – and no wonder the Ghosts liked a little sea-bottom ooze to play in at Minda’s. ‘What are we doing here?’

  Kanda murmured, ‘This is the warmest place in the city. What we intend to do is release all that heat, dump it into the environment.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘We’re going to give them indigestion,’ Five murmured. ‘Positions.’

  The hunters spread out. Their projectile weapons and that antiquated gravity-wave handgun were raised at the feeding pod.

  Five called, ‘Three, two, one.’

  Fire burst from the projectile weapons, and cherry-red starbreaker light ripped from the ancient handgun. The pod’s wall was elastic; it burst like a soap bubble. That big floating mud ball splashed to the ground amid a hail of ice droplets. Steam flashed, instantly frosting. The feeding Ghosts fled in panic.

  And as the mud’s heat was dumped, the ground subsided, a pit dilating open, like an immense version of the fingertip dimple Kanda had made on the walk. It was as if the substance of the world had shrunk back in protest from the warmth, Donn thought. Nearby structures began to slip into the widening pit, or they floated away, gravitational anchors broken.

  Kanda said, ‘We’ve been seeding this whole area with cryo nests for weeks. If you hit the cryos with too much heat they have ways of responding . . .’

  The disruption spread rapidly as buildings further from the imploding centre were hauled over by the disrupted rope tangle. The hunters started to make the damage worse, slashing glowing light cables with their blades.

  Now Ghosts spilled out of the tangle, trying to escape. Just as Kanda had suggested, they fell to the ground, poured down the open throughway and flowed out of the city. And they started to get caught in the traps the humans had set.

  Five stood in the open. ‘We’ll have fifteen, twenty minutes before they organise to get rid of us. Let’s get this done.’ She raised her spear.

  Donn watched Five slaughter one Ghost.

  Its skin was already punctured where it was snagged on the barbed wire the humans had set, and air and bloody liquid fountained, crystalline, from its wounds. Now Five leapt on the Ghost, landing sprawled on its hide. Gripping with her legs, she coiled her back upwards, and struck down with a stabbing sword, as hard as she could. Then she slid to the ground, leaving the blade 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 lunged again. This time she used a tool like a long-handled hook to dig into the already gaping wounds, and she dragged out a length of bloody rope, intestine perhaps. It coiled on the ground, steaming and quickly freezing. And Five struck again, and again.

  All around Donn, the humans laboured at trapped Ghosts with 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, cannibalised from a crashed Ghost ship, invisibly pouring out the Ghost’s precious hoarded heat.

  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, towards the Ghost she had eviscerated. He actually put 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 focused 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 trailing 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 found he had nothing to say. He reached up and pinched his hood by the cheeks. One firm tug and all this would be over—

  ‘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.
r />   The rats, Hama and Kanda and the rest, evidently astonished, stood back from their butchery. They were crusted with frozen blood, weapons in their hands.

  Eve Raoul looked down at her feet. She was up to her ankles in frozen air. The Virtual protocol violations must be agonising 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 the rats’ 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 Sink Ambassador. Do what it says. This is more important than you can imagine . . .’ Her voice tailed off, and she broke up into a cloud of blocky pixels that dwindled and vanished.

  Trembling, exhausted, Donn felt irritated. If they’d let him die it could all have been over in an instant. No more shocks, no more changes, no more choices. Death would have been easier, he felt, than facing whatever came next. He 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.’ 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. We try to learn.’

  Donn said, ‘What do you want of me, Ambassador?’