It was a pleasant, low-ceilinged saloon, decorated in silver and green, the traditional color scheme of the young culture of interstellar transport. Light gleamed from above like sunlight through leaves, the floor had the effects of grass and mosses. They sat around a blond wood table, actually extruded ceramic fiber, that faithfully recalled polished birch. The air was fresh and sweet, the whole impression was as if they were in a roomy tent, a pavilion pitched in sunny woodland, somewhere in the Blue Planet's beautiful temperate zones. But outdoors the blizzard raged, pitiless, unimaginable. The hum of the torus was never-ending; they no longer heard it. And if it ever stopped, that deep subliminal murmur, they would not have time to notice it was gone.
The Active Complement had just found out—Panfilo Nube, Payload Officer, had discovered the small print of the manifest, in an idle moment—that one of the pieces in the hold was supposed to be haunted. It was a tomb, but the ghost was not the official owner, so to speak. It was something called a “Tomb Wife,” some kind of ghoul associated with tombs in Lar'sz’ culture. Nadeem, the moody, black-browed Homeostat Commissar, had asked Sigurt—half joking—was this spook definitely dead? They didn't know much, but they knew that the people of Sigurt's World were very long-lived, with a propensity for long comas when times were hard. Sigurt had answered cheerfully that one could not be absolutely sure; and hence the explanation.
"A Tomb Wife did not provide for herself, you see,” he continued. “She was a hermit, a sadhu.” He smiled at Nadeem, who did not smile back. “Her family or her servants would supply food and necessities, but they never saw her. Among the peasantry of course the widow simply went to live in the graveyard, in full view of her neighbors. Her exclusion from society was formal, ritual...."
Rafael, the young Assistant Navigator, frowned uneasily. “But how can you say you're not absolutely sure she's dead? The relics down there are thousands of years old, aren't they? I don't mind, I'd just like to know. A ghost is cool, but a thing that lives in a tomb and isn't dead, well—"
In a starship's psychological topography, the hold is always down. Nobody laughed. Rafe suffered from transit nightmares, an affliction as crippling as seasickness—but it didn't affect his efficiency, or his passion for this strange ocean.
"I think we can assume she's dead,” said the mischievous alien. “In the records of Tene'Lar'sznh, the royal house to which this princess belonged, it's noted that the food-offerings first went untouched about fifteen hundred years ago, our time. That's about four thousand of Blue years, I think?"
The Active Complement nodded hurriedly, in unison. Vast timescales made them nervous. A little less, thought Elen, the Navigator. She was intimately aware of the relation between a Blue Planet “year” and the same period for Sigurt's planet; as she was aware of every detail of the impossible equations of this journey. She wanted to put Sigurt right, but how would she reach the end of that sentence? But when, in what relation, at what particular moment? She closed the floodgates with an effort.
"The food went untouched?” she repeated. “And that's how they knew? So, what did they do, when a Tomb Wife's food ‘went untouched'?"
"Nothing at all.” Sigurt's pointed teeth flashed: the modified aggression of a grin, which seemed to be a constant of humanoid life. “How quick of you, Elen, you're exactly right. A lady of rank did not allow herself to be seen, once she'd taken up residence. Her servants or family would continue to supply her needs, but they were forbidden, by the lady's own will and testament, to go looking for her, and the tomb could be a large and complex building. Nobody would know when, precisely, the offerings became offerings to the dead.” He paused. “Isn't that beautiful? After a year—or thereabouts, depending on the liturgical calendar—the undertakers were allowed inside. The lady's remains would be found and there'd be a funeral. In the case of our princess, however, legend has it that no remains were ever recovered. And that is how this particular tomb became known as ‘haunted.’”
"She probably legged it one dark night,” decided Rafe, with relief: and then blushed. “Uh, sorry if that's a poor taste idea, Sigurt, no offense."
"None taken."
"Aren't you a Lar'sz'ian, Sigurt?” wondered Carter, the burly ship's doctor, who wore the captain's armband. “Larziote, Larzy-ite, however you say it?” Carter was one of those people who have to assert themselves in the presence of celebrity or renown. He had a horror of showing deference to anything or anyone.
For a moment the alien bristled, a startled double-take of affront, thought Elen (although she couldn't be sure). The Lar'sz’ were now (when is now, where is now?) an impoverished, short-lived remnant. The famous tombs, temples, ruins, were scattered over scratch-dirt, subsistence farming desert country. Maybe it was like telling a Brazilian you'd thought he was Portugese.
"My family has Tene'Lar't ancestry, but it's a long way back."
Nadeem the Commissar shifted in his recollection of a birchwood chair: restless with thoughts he knew nobody shared. “Why do you say ‘Tomb Wife,’ Sigurt? Why a lady? You beings don't have our two biological sexes."
Nadeem was a Diaspora-denier. He would bore the socks off you explaining, interminably, how actually there was no uncontroversial evidence that all planetary variants on the sentient biped model, all the possessors of “numinous intelligence,” capable of interstellar transit, were descended from a single species. He passionately refused to accept that the original species had been a hominid from the Blue Planet—a precursor of Homo sapiens who had flourished and vanished, leaving only the faintest and most puzzling of traces. It's only a theory, he'd insist.
And yet the man was a scientist.
You had to excuse him (they did excuse him, they were very tolerant of each other's foibles. Sigurt shared this trait, or he could not have joined them). You had to remind yourself that believing that the Earth was the center of the cosmos had once been good science and sound common sense, and many eminent scientists had clung to the old model, long after the new facts arrived.
Diaspora-deniers favored the term “beings.” They thought it made them sound rational and agnostic; which it did not. The rest of the Actives called their illustrious friend an alien, without embarrassment, because at home alien had become a term for the much-loved human practice of bodymorphing, and they'd forgotten it might be offensive. Sigurt didn't seem to mind. He called them “Blues."
He was not just eminent, he was an original, a Blue Planetophile. His skill in “Blue” languages had not been acquired for the sake of this trip; it was his hobby in real life. He had no trouble dealing with Nadeem.
"Ah, good point.” He pondered, raising his eyebrows, which were commas of black velvet, the same texture as the close mat of hair (or fur) that covered his skull and extended down his neck and across his shoulders, glimpsed at the throat of his ship-issue green jumper. “Let me think. No, I'm sure ‘wife’ is correct. The wife is the one who remains, who cannot tear herself away. This is social gender, not biology."
Nadeem was not satisfied. Ideally, he explained, all self-respecting other beings, when speaking human language, should call themselves it—
Elen imagined a dry landscape, a dustbowl sky: parched mounds with small stone markers (the graves she envisaged were Muslim, somehow). The burial ground was sown with sad hunched shapes outside little cardboard shacks; the villages were depopulated of grandmas. Did the tomb-wives really choose seclusion? Or were they compelled by the iron hand of custom? Which nobody inside the rules will ever admit is an oppression. The blizzard outside ought to be a sandstorm, she thought, to match their cargo. But it was whiteness she always imagined “out there.” A white darkness of quantum vacuum. She noticed that Sigurt had said wives, not widows, though his English was very good; and she wondered about that. They are not the widows of the dead but the wives of the tombs.
"Stop kidding yourself, Batman.” Nadeem was getting agitated. “It's not a one-off planetary evolution that we have in common, it's time, gravity, hydrogen bond
s. It's an accident of convergent evolution that we look more or less alike. You've let yourself get sucked in to a cheap, tourist way of thinking, denying your own difference, fantasizing that you can understand us—"
"You're a racist jerk, Nadeem,” responded Sigurt amiably. “Anyway, you just did it yourself."
"What— ?"
The alien raised his arms, spreading the webs between his slender fingers, hooking the air with his claws. “Anthropomorphizing. You called me Batman."
* * * *
Elen suited up and visited the hold. The float tube delivered her to darkness, where she drifted from one handhold to the next, following track lights to the main cargo compartment. She flooded the great space with air and pressure, touched down as gravity embraced her, took off her helmet, passed through the lock, and walked into a cavern at the roots of a sea-mount. The habitat a green, sunlit island far above—
The artifacts were crated in force fields, but she couldn't adjust the light above art-conservation level. Pedants, she murmured, marveling at the dim, pixelated spectacle. The Lar'sz’ part of the collection was the most impressive: so damned impressive you could almost justify the mad expense of the shipping. The haunted tomb was huge, multistoried. It caught her breath. She circled it slowly, calculating that their whole living quarters would easily fit into the Tomb Wife's portico.
There was a single doorway, a black teardrop without a door: set about two meters above ground level, amid a coruscation of carved and inlaid stone. It would be a scramble to get inside. Perhaps the front steps had been left behind, or there was a secret mechanism, something like ancient Egypt. She sat cross-legged, slightly awkward in her suit, gazing. Like most sailors of the strange ocean, she rarely got farther than the dockside when she made landfall. Even if there'd been more time and less bureaucracy she wouldn't have been tempted by a lightning tour of Sigurt's planet. What for? You'd see so little. You'd learn hardly anything.
She'd been interested in the cargo as a professional challenge, a factor in her caculations. The science of transporting massive material objects was in its infancy, and artwork was a nightmare! But here in the gloom she felt the value of these things. A virtual Lar'sz’ tomb, freighted through the transit in a courier's brain, downloaded into the digital inventories of a limited-release of premier museums, could never have had this presence. The Exhibition was going to be a revelation.
There was nothing to stop them from breaching the force fields for a preview, without the fuzz. No areas were barred to Active Complement, except the fearsome threshold of the torus itself. She should come back with Sigurt, get him to give her a guided tour. But not the tomb, she thought.
If she went into the tomb, she'd like to do it alone.
The image of a dessicated heap of bones and skin, preserved intact, flitted through her mind. The Tomb Wife in a stone room, an old lady fallen down with a broken hip, too proud to cry for help when she heard her servants arriving and departing. But how old was she? Maybe she was still young when the food offerings “remained untouched.” Sigurt would know. She would ask him. Or better, she'd look it up herself, and impress him by knowing something. It was probably all in the background files the Complement didn't bother to read.
If the practice had survived into historical times it could still be happening. Suttee had continued in India long after the Brits tried to stamp it out, had resurfaced even in the Space Age. But it was the haunting that fascinated Elen. Do ghosts travel? Did pharaohs and Inca sacrifices ever wake up, bewildered, in glass cases, half a world away from home? Did they wake up in modern times, to find themselves replicated in software? What about a journey so immense that it has no duration? What damage would the relativity storm of the blizzard do to something as fragile as spiritual remains? How embarrassing if the loaned archaeology arrived stripped of its patina and pedigree.... How embarrassing for the fledgling enterprise of interstellar freight, if there should be a Missing Legend incident!
She listened until she was sure she could hear footsteps inside the ziggurat. No, it's okay, she's still there, still haunting. Unhurried, peaceful, timeless, the Tomb Wife was going about her quiet routines.
* * * *
Rafe had agonized nightmares in which the Lar'sz’ ghûl crept around his brain and scratched at his bunk closure: seeking live human flesh. Seriously repentant, Sigurt dredged up (or fabricated) some potent ancient Lar'sz'ian prayers, which he translated into English phonemes, and taught Rafe to recite. Elen had said nothing about the footsteps in the tomb, but she felt equally responsible. She might have leaked it into the shared reality; telepathy artifacts were the bane of starfaring. You learned that you had to think no evil of your companions in the matrix, or there would be hell to pay. And don't imagine spooks, or somebody will get spooked.
She did not confess. It would only have made Rafe worse.
* * * *
At the end of a long shift she unplugged herself from the mainframe, meeting as always the adrenaline of panic as she returned to ship-time: clutching at her stomach, icy down her spine. Carter was the captain on this trip, thank God. But Elen was the one who crunched the numbers. She was finally responsible for all the lives on board (not to mention those huge ancient gewgaws in the hold). And the worst was knowing that if—if!—she'd let a transcription error get by, it would not manifest itself until the closing phase. Not until too late. That's quantum computing, no way around it.
The terror of the blizzard engulfed her. No radio, no GPS for this ocean. No ground control for this spaceship, not the slightest possibility of rescue. She saved-off their position meticulously, although off-frame storage was nonsense, no such thing as a Black Box; and let the solidity of the banks of instruments and winking screens reassure her. The freighter's official name was Pirate Jenny (not that Actives themselves bothered much with names of starships); reflecting the Brechtian, Utopian leanings of the parent company, and its financial partner, the World State of Earth. Other ships were the Clement Atlee and the Eleanor Roosevelt. Their sisters were the White Visitation, the Sacred Wicca, the Caer Siddi. Elen decided she preferred the occult strand. No Black Box but this is Black Art. We don't know what we are doing; we conjure with monstrous forces, far beyond our control.
Footsteps behind her, a breath on the back of her neck, a mocking sigh.
"So you got out,” she whispered, and turned slowly, hoping to catch a glimpse of the Tomb Wife's ghost. Nobody there. She never lets herself be seen—
* * * *
They grew accustomed to the extra presence. “I blame myself,” said Sigurt, but in fact the symptom was a common one, technically harmless in terms of neurophysics: believed to be benign by superstitious Actives. Only Rafe was troubled, and he had his prayers. Sigurt told stories. Nadeem the Commissar and the Chief Engineer flirted. The Assistant Navigator, Chief Engineer's former squeeze, took up with Passenger Liaison. Elen visited the hold again, alone. She'd decided against the guided tour.
In the low light, looking up at that black, balanced teardrop, she fell into a reverie in which the Tomb Wife tradition was not oppression but a shimmering resolve. Not to move on, not to let go of the past: to decide, so far and no farther. The princess had chosen to stick, as they say in cards, at the grief of loss. To stay with the absence, never to let it fritter away into vague anniversaries, faded rose leaves of memory. Was refusing to let go a feminine trait? Or was it a Blue trait, which she was cutting and pasting onto the customs of another planet? It was an Elen trait. She told people (family, boyfriends, outsiders), that she was an interstellar navigator for the adventure of it. The most exotic of exotic travel. But we do not travel, she thought. Not a step. When the transcription is done—what does when mean, where there is no time?—we will make the crossing in almost zero extension.
What we do is stay, in the paradoxical moment—
Without deliberation she stood up, used her sleeve controls to open the tomb's force field, and set her gloved palms on the doorsill. Her suit was limb
er, designed for active wear. A push downward, a bounce up, she had her knee on stone. As she stood up diffuse lighting welled around her. The tomb had been prepared for visitors. She realized, disappointed, that she couldn't possibly be the first to enter since the Tomb Wife's time: probably not even the first Blue! A short passage led into a stone room, where a table like an altar stood against an inner wall. Above it a life-size mural, in brilliant color, showed two people, same height, same build, sitting opposite each other, informally; knees up. They both looked like Sigurt, in a generic way. They were gazing at each other, their diamond-shaped eyes over-bright, their smiling lips full of sadness. Both had the short cape of black velvet fur. One of them seemed to be wearing a black half-mask. It was this figure who reached to the other, one slender hand outstretched, as if in an unfinished caress. Below them on the altar stood an array of diamond-shaped bowls: a curved platter, a heap of dry rags.
She looked into the bowls. Dead leaves, granular dust—
Are the conventions of mourning a universal constant? Elen thought of Etruscan tombs, Chinese ancestor worship. Her files contained no data, only the vaguest notions, but she was pretty sure that mural was a masterpiece. Her gauntleted hand must have brushed one of the artifacts. A label sprang into existence in the air, explaining—in Sigurt's planet's dominant script, in English, and in a third writing she didn't recognize—that the actual bowls and platters had been taken away, with their ancient contents. These were replicas. The dry rags were a replica of the decayed set of clothes that had been found—
The past as theme-park is a universal constant.
She explored the stone corridors of the ground floor, paying no further attention to the artwork: ghoulish and hopeful as a child, looking for the bones that had never been discovered. She found only dust, and very little of that. There were no stairways to the upper floors, and nothing she could identify as living quarters. The artful lighting started to make her feel like a tourist. She took refuge in the gloomiest of the courtyards and sat there looking at another black teardrop, halfway up a wall: quietly visiting the shade of a long-dead “princess."
FSF Magazine, August 2007 Page 17
