The Ghost Sister

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by Liz Williams


  Shu Gho came to see me that night, slipping in through the doorway. I woke to find her sitting by the side of the bed.

  “Eleres?” she said in a whisper. “Do you mind me being here? I couldn't sleep. Bad dreams.”

  “I don't mind,” I said. We talked for a time, and then I took her hand in mine and led her to her own small chamber. I lit the fire.

  “There,” I said gently. “Would you like me to sit here until you go to sleep?”

  She looked up at me. She had to crame her neck, and for a moment she reminded me of Luta, who was, perhaps, my grandmother.

  “Thank you,” she said. “Eleres? What will you do, now? Are you planning to go journeying again?”

  “No,” I said. “I'm staying here for the winter. I've had enough of traveling for a while, and there'll be the migration in the spring, anyway.”

  Shu glanced at me, quizzically. “Do you think there'll still be a migration?”

  “Why wouldn't there be? Unless the moons fall out of the sky.”

  “Eleres—I'm not sure that your people's migrations have anything to do with the moons, even if they seem to. I know that Luta talks of the twelve-yearly conjunction, but according to my calculations the moons fall into that pattern every couple of years and you don't all get the urge to rush off then.”

  “The twelve-yearly conjunction's the important one, though.” I frowned. It was something I'd never questioned before.

  Shu did not look convinced. “Well, maybe. But I think you've all been searching for Outreven. Drawn back to it, like birds to the nest. Or a child to its home.”

  “But migrations don't end in Outreven.”

  “No, because if you're on foot, the Gulf of Temmerar and the mountains are in the way, and you come to a natural halt—just as well, or you'd end up in the sea. But I'm sure that Outreven's what your people have been looking for, even if you don't know it.”

  I considered this. “Perhaps we have,” I conceded. “But even if Outreven no longer affects us quite in the way it once did, that doesn't mean we won't still keep looking for it, even if we don't know that's what we're doing. People need myths, Shu. They need meaning, and dreams to draw them together. And Outreven is still the first and greatest dream of all.”

  She looked at me for a moment. “You'd have made a good anthropologist, Eleres.”

  “A what?”

  “It doesn't matter,” she murmured. Her eyes drifted shut. I waited until she passed into dreaming. And as she slept, she smiled.

  Epilogue

  The family ghost came with us on the migration that spring. Now, so many years later, I do not remember much about the migration but imagination supplies the lack. In my mind's sight, I see a stream of people heading out across the plains, walking southeast. The mountains are a mass of shadow in the distance, snow peaked, and the new grass springing beneath our feet. I watch us walking, led by the landlines all the way to the far coast of Temmerar, all the way to the edge of the world. And I see us standing together on the cliff's edge—ghost and human; child and adult; the living and the dead—with the green seas of the world spanning before us and the sun coming up over the islands.

  About the Author

  LIZ WILLIAMS is the daughter of a stage magician and a Gothic novelist, and currently lives in Brighton, England. She has a Ph.D. in philosophy of science from Cambridge and her career since ranges from reading tarot cards on Brighton pier to teaching in Central Asia. She has had short fiction published in Asimov's, Interzone, The Third Alternative and Visionary Tongue, among others, and is coeditor of the recent anthology Fabulous Brighton. She is also the current secretary of the Milford UK SF Writers' Workshop. The Ghost Sister is her first novel. She is currently working on her second.

  THE GHOST SISTER

  A Bantam Spectra Book / July 2001

  SPECTFLA and the portrayal of a boxed “s” are trademarks of Bantam Books, a division of Random House, Inc.

  Copyright © 2001 by Liz Williams.

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  eISBN: 978-0-307-48544-1

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