The “port” was a cluster of translucent domes. There wasn’t even a finished pad, just pits in the ice left by the bellies of passing ships. As the corvette settled to the ground, ice crunched softly. Without delay, an interface tunnel snaked out of one of the domes and nuzzled against the corvette’s hull.
They arrived in a dome that was all but transparent. Charon, suspended directly overhead, was visible through the dome’s scuffed surface.
Draq was here in person. As agitated as before, he bustled up, grinning, as Nilis and Pirius approached. Eight more people stood behind him. Some, smoother-faced, might have been female, but they all looked alike to Pirius, round-faced and potbellied.
Draq’s robes were clearly old, heavily repaired, and he smelled stale. “Welcome, welcome again. We’re delighted you have visited us, and we’re ready to assist you any way we can…” As the little man chattered on, Pirius wondered how true that was; Draq must be concerned his covert facility had even been noticed. His colleagues gathered around the Commissary like infants around a cadre leader. They reminded Pirius of the tiny isolated community on Port Sol: these characters weren’t so far from the sun, but they seemed even odder.
But they weren’t paying any attention to Pirius. He walked toward the dome’s clear wall and gazed out at Pluto.
There were clouds above him, wispy cirrus, occluding bone-white stars: they were aerosol clusters, according to Nilis’s briefing material, suspended in the atmosphere of nitrogen and methane. The landscape was surprisingly complex, a starlit sculpture of feathery ridges and fine ravines — although perhaps it wouldn’t be so interesting away from Christy. Sol was a point of light, low on the horizon, wreathed in the complex strata of a cloud. The inner system was a puddle of light around Sol, an oblique disc small enough for Pirius to cover with his palm. It was strange to think that that unprepossessing blur had contained all of man’s history before the first pioneers had risked their lives by venturing out to the rim of Sol system, and beyond.
Charon hung directly over Pirius’s head. It was a misty blue disc, six times the size of Luna as seen from Earth. He had been trained for spectacles like this, but he flinched from the sight of a world hanging over him like a light globe. Charon’s surface looked pocked. No doubt there was plenty of impact cratering, even here in this misty, spacious place, but many of the gouges he could make out, even with his naked eyes, were deep and quite regular.
“They are quarries.”
He turned. One of Draq’s gaggle of followers had come to stand beside him. She was evidently a woman; her face, turned up to the light of Charon, had a certain delicacy about the brow, the cheekbones.
“Quarries?”
“My name is Mara. I work with Draq.” She smiled at him, then looked away. Though she seemed rather awestruck, she evidently didn’t share Draq’s giggling foolishness. “Michael Poole himself came here, thousands of years ago. Our most famous visitor — before you, of course! He traveled from Jupiter on a GUTdrive ship, and he and his engineers used Charon ice to make exotic matter—”
“To build a wormhole mouth.”
“Yes. Here, Poole completed his cross-system wormhole transit network. When it was done, why, you could travel from Pluto all the way to Mercury almost as easily as you walked through that tunnel from your ship… there.” She pointed up toward Charon’s limb. Pirius made out a spark of light, no brighter than the remote stars, but it drifted as he watched. “That’s Poole’s interface station — or the ruins of it.” The Qax had of course shut down Poole’s venerable spacetime engineering, and over the millennia since, most of his interface stations had been broken up, their raw material reused.
Not here, though; nobody had bothered to do even that much.
Mara defended her adopted world. “It’s true nobody lives here — nobody but us, that is. The Coalition has tried to establish settlements, but they always fail. There has never been enough to keep people here, no resource you couldn’t find on a thousand Kuiper moons, and in more shallow gravity wells at that. But we do have our marvels.”
Pluto’s orbit was so elliptical it sailed within the orbit of Neptune. At the closest approach to Sol, the atmosphere expanded to three planetary diameters. Then, when Pluto turned away from Sol and sailed into its two-hundred-year winter, the air snowed down.
Mara described all this lyrically. She seemed eager to have someone new to talk to. Those exiled here called themselves Plutinos, she said. Pirius was drawn by her sense of this remote world, which swam through immense, empty volumes while slow, subtle seasons of ice came and went.
“Ah,” she said now. “Look up.”
Puzzled, he glanced up at the looming, misty shape of Charon. “I don’t see anything.”
She waved a hand, and the light intensity in their corner of the dome reduced.
As his eyes dark-adapted, more stars came out, peering around Charon’s limb, and he made out more detail on the moon’s mottled surface. He leaned close to Mara’s shoulder to see, and his cheek brushed the coarse cloth of her robe. There was a mustiness about her, but he was not repelled, as he had been by Draq; she was strange, he thought, even eccentric, but oddly likeable. He wondered what her story was, how she had come to be assigned to a covert establishment on this remote world.
She pointed again. “There — can you see? Look along my arm.”
Suddenly he saw it, stretching between Pluto and its moon. Only dimly visible in Sol’s reduced light, a glimmer here, a stretch of arc there, it was nothing like the Bridge that had been erected between Earth and its Moon — this was finer, more elegant, more organic than that. But it was a line that spanned worlds nevertheless.
Pirius had heard of this. “It’s natural, isn’t it?”
“It’s spiderweb,” she breathed. “Pluto-Charon is swathed in spiderweb.”
Nilis came bustling up. “One of Sol system’s more memorable spectacles,” he said. “And it is only possible here, where both worlds are locked face to face.” He slapped Pirius on the back. “But we aren’t here to sight-see, Ensign! We have work to do.”
Reluctantly they rejoined the rest of the group, who were crowding into a flitter.
The journey was going to be long, Pirius was told; they would be taken right around the curve of the world. He was dismayed that the little craft was already full of these exiled scientists’ peculiar odors.
As they took their places, Mara sat beside Pirius. She said, “You must come back in the spring, when the spiders of Pluto come out to sail between the worlds and build their webbing all over again.”
“Spring? When’s that?”
“Oh, about another seventy years…”
The flitter lifted smoothly.
They flew silently through the geometry of the double worlds.
Pirius, retreating from the chattering group, spent the journey preparing a long Virtual message to Torec, who was stuck at Saturn, still working on the development of the CTC processor. He fixed a cloak of antisound around himself so the Plutinos would not be offended by what he had to say about them.
When the cramped little craft began at last to descend, Charon was long lost beneath the horizon. There was nothing to be seen here, nothing but the fractured, ancient ground. But before the flitter, the ground rose to a ridge. Beyond this, evidently, was what they had come to see.
Draq said, “We’ll walk from here, rather than fly. It’s best if you come to the facility yourself. There’s nothing quite so striking as a purely human experience — don’t you think, Commissary?”
Pirius was glad to seal up his skinsuit, which smelled of nothing but him. But the Commissary, as usual, demurred, and insisted that a Virtual projection would do just as well for him.
So Pirius stepped out onto the surface of yet another world. Sol was halfway up the sky, a diamond of light.
He took a few experimental steps. Gravity was only a few percent of standard. The ice crunched, compressing, but the fractured surface supported his weight. Pluto ice was a rich c
rimson laced with organic purple. He made out patterns, dimly, in the ice; they were like bas-relief, discs the size of dinner plates, with the intricate complexity of snowflakes. The suit’s insulation was good, but enough heat leaked to send nitrogen clouds hissing up around his footsteps.
The group began to climb the shallow ridge. There were five of them out on the ice, if you included Nilis. Draq led the way, and Pirius and Nilis followed, with two other Plutinos, including Mara, who walked with Pirius. Nilis floated serenely a few centimeters above the ice, barefoot and without so much as a face mask, once more blithely ignoring all Virtual protocols. It was crassly discourteous, Pirius thought, irritated. But the Plutinos were too polite, or too cowed, to mention it.
Where the ground was steeper, the frost covering had slipped away. The “bedrock” here was water ice, but ice so cold it was hard as granite on Earth, and Pirius thought he could feel its chill through the heated soles of his boots. But it wasn’t slippery; at Pluto’s temperatures even the heat his suit leaked wasn’t sufficient to melt the surface.
And when Pirius stepped onto the bare ice, he thought he heard music. He stopped, surprised. The ground throbbed with a bass harmonization he could feel in his chest. It was as if he heard the frozen planet’s beating heart.
Mara smiled. “Wait and see,” she said.
They reached the shallow breast of the ridge. Pirius saw now that the ridge was one of a line of shallow, eroded hills that circled a basin. It was a crater, he realized, but clearly a very ancient one. Though the floor was cracked and tumbled, its unevenness was worn down almost to smoothness. Over perhaps billions of years, the remnants of the great scar had sublimated away, the icy hillocks of its rim relaxed to shallowness, and the invisible hail of cosmic rays had battered at the crust, turning it blood red, like the ice of Port Sol.
And Pirius saw what he had been brought to witness. On the floor of this palimpsest of a crater nestled a city.
At first all Pirius could make out was a pale, scattered sparkle, as if stars from the silent sky had fallen down to the ice. Then he realized he was seeing the reflections of the stars, returned from silvered forms that nestled on the crater floor.
He tapped his faceplate to increase the magnification. The basin was covered by reflective forms, like mercury droplets, glistening on a black velvet landscape. It was a forest of globes and half- globes, anchored by cables. Necklaces swooped between the globes, frosted with frozen air. A city, yes, obviously artificial, and presumably the source of the deep harmonics that traveled to him through the ice. But it wasn’t a human city, and as the ground throbbed beneath his feet, Pirius felt his heart beat faster in response.
Every child in every cadre in every colony across the Galaxy would have recognized this city for what it was, and who must have built it. Every child grew up learning all there was to know about mankind’s greatest enemy save the Xeelee — long vanquished, scattered, its worlds invested and occupied, its facilities destroyed, and yet still a figure of legend and nightmare.
Pirius sensed something behind him, something massive. He turned slowly.
He found himself facing a silvered sphere perhaps two meters across. Pirius could see his own reflection, a bipedal figure standing on blood-dark ice, distorted in the sphere’s belly, and Sol cast a flaring highlight. The sphere hovered without support above the ice, wafting gently as if in some intangible breeze. Its hide was featureless, save for an equipment belt slung around its equator.
Draq stood alongside the sphere, which loomed over him, and slapped its hide. “Now, sirs — what do you think of that? Isn’t it a magnificent beast?”
It was a Silver Ghost. Pirius wished he had a weapon.
The Commissary, taller and bulkier than any of the Plutinos, drew himself up to his full height. Pirius wondered if he had pumped up his Virtual a little for effect. Nilis seemed coldly furious. “Curator Draq, I thought Ghosts had been driven to extinction.”
“Evidently not,” Pirius growled. Mara looked at him uneasily.
Draq gazed at the Ghost’s hide. “Look at this stuff! A Ghost’s skin is the most reflective material in the known universe — and so the most effective heat trap, of course. But it is actually technological. It contains what we call a Planck-zero layer, a sandwich around a zone where the very constants of physics have been tweaked. And the Ghosts incorporated that technology into their own biology. Remarkable: at one time, every living Ghost went about its business clad in a shell that was effectively part of another universe!”
Mara, standing by the Ghost, actually stroked its hide. Pirius thought her gesture was soft, perhaps meant to be reassuring — reassuring to the Ghost.
Pirius’s confusion deepened further. “Commissary, this is a Silver Ghost. It shouldn’t even exist, let alone be bouncing around on Pluto!”
Draq was intimidated by a Commissary, but evidently not by a kid like Pirius. He even seemed triumphant. “We’ve done this to further the goals of the Coalition, Ensign. To serve the Third Expansion!”
Nilis turned on him. “But the boy’s right, curator.”
Draq’s restless hands, encumbered by his skinsuit gloves, wriggled and pulled at each other. “But can’t you see — that’s the sheer excitement of the project. The Ghosts were of course wiped out. But perhaps you know that the Ghosts were composite creatures — each of them symbiotic communities, comprising many living beings, some from worlds alien to the Ghosts themselves, and with their technology merged into their structure, too. And their technologies were simply too useful. For example, hides like this are grown on controlled farms across the Galaxy. Strange to think that bits of what might have been Ghosts are at work, in the service of mankind, all across the Galaxy. If we had been defeated, perhaps the Ghosts would use human leg muscles and livers, hearts, and bones in their machinery!
“And so when, ah, the decision was made that the Ghosts themselves should be revived, under controlled conditions of course, it wasn’t hard to reassemble a self-sustaining community. They are quite at home here, on Pluto; perhaps you know they came from a chill world, colder than Pluto, and their technology, what we’ve been able to recover, serves them well.”
“But why?”
“Because Ghosts are a valuable resource.”
Ghosts were… strange.
Early in their history, their sun had failed, their world had frozen. The universe had betrayed them, literally — and this had taught them that the universe contained design flaws. And so their science turned to fixing those flaws. They ran experimental programs of quite outrageous ambition. Humans certainly had cause to fear them, before they were crushed.
Draq said, “Long ago, the Coalition councils decided that the Ghosts’… ah, ingenuity should be revived — put to use as an engine of ideas, a resource for the benefit of mankind. This was done over and over with other races during the Assimilation, you know. Why not the Ghosts?”
Pirius said, “A resource you had to conceal.”
“Yes! For security — both for humanity’s protection from the Ghosts, and vice versa. And for deniability, I won’t pretend that isn’t true. But you’re here for the Ghosts, whether you know it or not, Commissary. The gravastar idea is theirs—”
Mara said coldly, “This ’valuable resource’ can talk.”
The Ghost hovered impassively. There was no change in its appearance, yet the grammar of the group changed. Suddenly the Ghost stopped being an object, but became a person, a contributor to the conversation.
Nilis walked up to the silvered hide, his Virtual projection casting a blurred reflection on the Ghost’s belly. “It can talk, can it? I see it has a translator box on that belt.” He stood before the Ghost, hands on hips. “You! Ghost!”
Mara said, “There’s no need to shout, Commissary.”
Nilis said, “Do you have a name?”
The Ghost’s voice was synthetic, a neutral human-female voice generated by the translator box it carried, and transmitted to their receiving gear.
“I am known as the Ambassador to the Heat Sink.”
Nilis seemed startled. He prodded the Ghost’s hide, but his Virtual finger slid into the reflective surface, shattering into pixels. “And do you know the meaning of the name?”
“No,” the Ghost said bluntly. “I am a reconstruction. A biological echo of my forebears. We have records, but no memory. There can be no true cultural continuity.”
Nilis nodded coldly. “Despite all our ingenuity, extinction is forever.”
“Yes,” the Ghost said simply.
Mara’s expression was dark. “What do you think now, Ensign?”
Pirius spoke without thinking about it. “The Ghosts killed millions of us.” He faced the Ghost. “I’m glad you are conscious. I’m glad you know about the elimination of your kind. I am glad you are suffering.”
The Ghost didn’t respond.
Mara’s bleak gaze was on Pirius. He had to look away, disturbed by the turmoil inside him.
Nilis seemed fascinated by the Ghost, as his scientist’s curiosity overcame his Commissary’s ideology. “If you don’t know who you are, do you at least know what you want?”
“To serve you,” the Ghost said.
Chapter 22
It took ten hours for a dropship to come pick them up from Factory Rock. Pirius Blue and his two wounded charges spent all that time huddling in the ruins of the Xeelee emplacement.
When the medical-corps orderly clambered out of his little craft, he was surprised to find them. The three of them were the only survivors of two platoons. “You must be the luckiest man alive,” the orderly said.
“I must be,” said Pirius Blue.
Cohl’s injury was obvious; Tili Three was in deep shock. The orderly said he was supposed to separate able-bodied Pirius from Cohl and Tili Three, and send them back through different “processing channels,” as he put it. Pirius refused to be parted from his comrades. It boiled down to a standoff between Pirius and the small, heavy orderly, there on the churned-up surface of the Rock. The orderly caved in, shrugging his shoulders, saying the officers would sort it out later.
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