“The inquest protects its own and you know it, Sun. It’s survival of the fittest.” She moved toward Aeryn, towering over her. She pulled up a finger as though it were a weapon and pointed it. “And I survived. But let me tell you—not only did I survive, I learned who I could trust. And it’s certainly not you.”
“Sutt, can we never move beyond this?” said Aeryn. “Let’s have a drink; it’s on me.” Her tone of voice was still friendly, but her eyes betrayed how tightly wound she was, how exasperated she was becoming.
“Buy me off, is that what you’re hoping to do? Not quite befitting a glorious soldier of the Peacekeepers, is it? And I’ll say right now, Sun, it’s not just me who’s wondering about your conduct. I’ve been hearing some very questionable things about your loyalties.”
Absurd. Aeryn Sun looked as though she were about to toss her drink in the captain’s eyes. She was volatile, was Sun—always was, always would be. The damnable thing was that when they had first met, they had immediately seen each other as kindred spirits. They enjoyed the same read-crystals and would talk not just about the men they had fancied in their short lives, but also their goals with the Peacekeepers. They’d been tough but wide-eyed, and together they saw the mission of the Peacekeepers in the universe as something almost sacred. Who else would bring order and stability to a chaotic universe? Who else would bring law and philosophy and intelligence to unruly civilizations who could develop into destructive terror? Who else but the Peacekeepers? And how could the Peacekeepers accomplish this without steadfast determination on the part of its warriors, its young soldiers bred for just such tasks?
But it had not all been seriousness back then in the training camps of Yunez. No, Sha Sutt had taught Aeryn Sun many games. Games of cha-cards and mooka-dice. Brain games and strategy games. In turn, Aeryn had begun to teach Sha a secret language of the L’Bu, something they alone could understand when out with the rough and rowdy fellow soldiers. Also, Sun had taught Sutt how to drink woozy Cak with a big stein of zooka ale to wash it down. And they had taught each other an inkling of what very few studious and serious Peacekeepers seemed to know how to do: to let down their guard and learn to enjoy life.
“I’ll say it again. Absurd. I would not abandon any fellow Peacekeeper or friend.”
“Former friend, Sun,” said Sutt. “And you’ve made me hate the very word!” With that she had spun on her heel and walked out without a backward glance.
That had been three cycles ago. When Sha Sutt had heard how Aeryn Sun been contaminated, she knew it must have been no accident. She had abandoned the glory of the cause and fraternized with the enemy, and Sutt was not surprised. There was no loyalty in the woman: nothing like the loyalty and honor that lived in Sha Sutt.
Now she had a chance to show her loyalty.
Now she could prove herself to Crais. Even now, he seemed to fade into view in her dream and she saw him standing on a balcony on that paradise world, smiling again, saying, “Do this for me. Follow them and kill them—for me.”
A beep-beep-beep stabbed into the dream. The misty form of Crais evaporated and again Sha Sutt was in her tiny cabin, sweating.
Automatically, she pressed the comm-stud.
“Yes. Sutt here.”
“Captain, please come to the bridge,” said a voice, the excitement in it barely controlled. “Immediately.”
* * *
The ghosts that appeared to Crichton in the depths of the alien starship looked as if they were composed of glittering points of light sketched into the frame of a person: sparkling, and yet transparent, insubstantial. They were clothed in long ghostly robes, and they gazed at Crichton with unmistakable relief and happiness. At first they had spoken nothing but gibberish, though they had offered him a platter full of ripe and glistening fruit—Earth-fruit, it seemed: cherries, grapes, peaches with the blush still on them. The smell was delectable. They gestured to him so much that he had finally shrugged and sampled a grape—and immediately found, to his surprise, that he could understand their speech.
“You have come!” said one.
“Blessed event!” said another.
“The Promised One!” rejoined the third.
Crichton stared at them. In fact, he stared straight through them. Yes, they were ghosts! At first he had thought maybe they were holograms. But no … there was something ineffably different here. This was no play of light, no laser-digitalized magic, but something stronger and more intense. The ghosts dazzled as they moved, and their colors were clouded by a pure and shimmering white.
Their shape conformed to the visual evolutionary model Crichton found out here: two arms, two legs, head, elongated body, binocular vision. Actually, though, as he looked he could see that the “arms” were in reality tentacles, with even smaller tentacles for fingers. Their figures were long and willowy, and they moved as if they were floating.
The room they were standing in was much less sterile and metallic than the corridors that had led into the ship; instead it seemed almost organic, a sickly green color, its walls soft with growths. A pale light filtered down from above. Except for the ghosts, the room was empty. Crichton had the uneasy feeling that he had been swallowed by some kind of alien Venus fly-trap.
“Who are you? I mean, what are you? Where am I? God, my head hurts!” said Crichton. “Tell me what the heck is going on!”
“Pardon the manner of our introduction. But you found the reality chamber, as we hoped, and we were able to read a signature of your thoughts. I am Pahl, and my colleagues are Leff and Igai.”
Crichton frowned. “The reality chamber? The place with the table set for dinner? I couldn’t detect much reality in that room!”
“Ah, you mean external reality,” said Pahl. He pressed his front tentacles together like an Asian monk about to give a bow. “The chamber reads internal reality. It reads your memories. You were thinking of a story about a mysterious ship on your home planet, and the room interpreted it into ‘reality’ for you. Unfortunately, you were also thinking of a certain nightmare you had once, about a gaping mouth, and the chamber also read that and swallowed you. Often we find these little slips rather amusing, but we did not mean to subject you to any harm.”
“It picked up on my thoughts? And made them into external reality?” Crichton thought of some nightmares he was glad he hadn’t been remembering at the time—and some dreams that might not be so bad, transfigured into reality. “But why?”
“Thoughts are just electrical impulses,” said the ghost. “We learned to translate them into reality long ago.” He gestured down at his own sparkling insubstantial form. “In fact, you might say that we on this ship are just thoughts of ourselves. But in your case, we had to be sure of who you are. And what better way to speak to you than with your own images?”
“Huh.” Crichton was having trouble taking it all in. “My head hurts … Well, that’s nothing new, anyway.” He shook off the throb and tried to focus on them. There was some question it was important to ask. “OK, so you can translate my thoughts into candles and meatloaf. But why do you need to know who I am? Couldn’t you just ask me?”
The third alien stepped forward, this one a slighter version of the alien form, its pale and shimmering robe trailing onto the soft green floor. It spoke in what sounded to Crichton like a woman’s voice. “We needed to know who you are in a deeper sense. We needed to know things about you that even you may not fully know.”
“Whoa,” Crichton replied. “Mind if I sit down?” He shook his head and sank down to the floor. The ground felt slightly fuzzy, like a dense carpet of moss. He scooted over to the wall and sat against it cross-legged. The ghosts took seats opposite him—on nothing. He blinked his eyes a couple of times to make sure he was seeing what he was seeing. They were sitting as if on low chairs, their tentacles in their laps. But there was nothing beneath them. They really were sitting on air.
“Let’s start from first principles,” said Crichton. “You’re—ghosts? Spirits of dead peopl
e? Or some other kind of transparent beings?”
The ghosts looked at each other, and Pahl spoke. “We have consulted your concepts, scientific and otherwise, as we scanned your brain. In the Earth sense, perhaps you would not call us ghosts, because we are not the spirits of dead people.”
Whew, thought Crichton. That’s good. Everything was bizarre enough without finding himself talking to dead people.
“However, in an effective sense, in the sense of our appearance and our generation, we are the apparitions of people whose bodies no longer exist. In that sense, then, yes, John Crichton, we are ghosts.”
“OK. You’re people without bodies, just the illusion of bodies. Looks like all our earthly concepts of materiality are wrong.” Crichton smacked himself on his head with the heel of his palm. “Nope. Still awake and now my head hurts even more.”
Pahl shook his head slowly. “No. Our bodies as a whole no longer exist, but an essential physical core lives on, kept safe elsewhere in this ship: tiny nodules of flesh, but enough. Those cores think us into being—generate us, you might even say ‘remember’ us. We are our own memories. But we are memories that will live for ever.”
Crichton opened his mouth, but found he hardly knew what to say. “Live forever—it sounds great, but it’s impossible.”
Pahl lifted his hands in a gesture that must surely have denoted encouragement. “A great deal is possible. We have made it possible. We are composed of energy generated from our minds, thoughts and memories. Perhaps the term you would use for what we are is—souls?”
Crichton sighed. “OK. Ghosts, souls—you’re some kind of generated energy-beings and you can generate stuff even out of my own mind. The technology sounds fascinating, and I’d love to have a look at it under better circumstances. But right now you’re holding us prisoner and you’ve got our ship trapped. So enough of the illusions already. We’re being pursued by people who want to kill us, and if you don’t kill us first, they will definitely be happy to oblige.”
The ghosts looked at each other, and then bent their heads together, blending their forms into a kind of whirling ectoplasm.
The leader pulled away and turned to Crichton.
“You are safe from your pursuers.”
“Oh, you think so? These are Peacekeepers. These are the meanest sons of bitches in the galaxy! And they want to string us all up.”
The ghost alien simply stared at Crichton for a moment.
“We are capable of dealing with any threat,” the alien stated, finally.
Crichton climbed to his feet. “So you say. Fine. If the Peacekeepers arrive, you may think differently. But we’ve got more immediate problems. I demand that you release our starship at once. You’ve picked my brain. Now let me go!”
The ghosts regarded him impassively, and Crichton felt himself growing angry.
“Hey! Do you hear what I’m saying? Let our ship go! We mean absolutely no harm to you and your ghost buddies, and me especially—I’m just a lost astronaut trying to find a way home!”
The leader rose and stepped back a moment, gazing intently at Crichton.
“Yes,” he said. “Yes, indeed. You are the Promised One!”
* * *
“The Promised One,” said the Queen of All Souls. “Yes. I sense him now, Roo-kin.” She lay stretched out on her daybed in the inner chamber of the palace, deep within the hip. She had generated herself a long robe tinged with a midnight blue, one that she remembered from long ago, and she watched the blue shimmer as it lay spread out on the daybed around her. She lifted her gaze to Roo-kin once more. “The Promised One is closer, is he not? He has entered the World.”
The OverLord bowed, the cuffs of his robe fluttering in a phantom wind. “Yes, Your Majesty.”
“This is not good, Roo-Kin,” said the Queen. “Would that I held full power over the World! Then that vessel would have been allowed to pass by. But no. The Day-folk! They are fools!”
“Yes, Your Majesty.” The OverLord had a worried, tense expression on his face, as if too much stating of the obvious might bring even more unpalatable truths into being.
The Queen rose, drifted to a window and looked out into the World. Currents of night drifted and shifted, smelling of slumber and soil.
“Tell me the Dayfolk version of the Prophecy of the Promised One,” said the Queen. “You have been studying it, have you not, for just such an event as this?”
“‘Oh, in the tides of night, from the beams of day…’”
“Not the full version, please. Condense.”
“Very well, Your Majesty. It is said that there will come a Promised One to the Dayfolk, the Dreamers Who Would Go Home. And this Promised One would wear a Mortal Coil. Thus armored, he would be able to descend into the Hole in the World, and wrest from their Moorings the Jewels of Dreaming, and return to the Dreamers their forms enfleshed and alive, and at last the Dreamers could go home.”
“The fools,” the Queen spat. “They were not made to go home. They deny their destiny. I shall not deny my destiny.”
“We shall then put a stop to the Promised One?” ventured Roo-kin.
The Queen stared off into the slumbering darkness.
“No,” she said quietly. “We will be able to turn him to our purposes. He has in him a love of night too. He would not be out among the stars without a love of night. I will take care of the Promised One.” She smiled. “Myself.”
CHAPTER 9
“All right,” said Captain Sha Sutt, her boots pounding resolutely on the floor as she strode towards the command chair. “What do you have for me?”
Her leg felt particularly heavy as she clumped it along onto the bridge. Its servo motors seemed to whine and grate inside her. Damned alien thing. She was grateful to be able to sit and let this new information cascade over her. Depression and mordant memory were gone now, evaporated under the input of new information—information that could factor into a victory. And victory, for a gamesman like Sha Sutt, was everything.
The sensorman punched up the vu-screen. “It’s some sort of archaic ship, Captain. We’re running analysis right now, but we thought you’d want to get the visuals immediately.”
The visual impacted, registered—but her iron will kept Sutt from betraying her inner surprise. The ship was monstrous, filling up the entire screen even at what the read-out said was quite a distance away. Sutt leaned forward and widened the display. The strange ship was an ovoid the size of a small moon. If it were hollow, you could fit a complete colony inside it. Sutt had heard of vessels this size, but never of this structure and style. But then, they were light-years outside Peacekeeper-known space. What could be expected?
“Impressive. But what’s the importance? We’re pursuing a Leviathan—though I must say this makes a Leviathan look like a guppy. Can we get in closer?”
“I suggest not. I’ll get better visuals,” said an adjunct officer. Once more gloved fingers tapped over controls and once more the vu-screen shifted, this time with a close-up. The visual registered with Sutt—and this time she allowed herself a smile. Near the surface of the gigantic star vessel, held transfixed by some kind of kelp-like projectiles, like a fish caught in the tendrils of a sea anemone, was the Leviathan that called itself Moya.
“You see why I suggested we keep our distance,” said the adjunct.
“I do indeed. A wise suggestion,” said Captain Sutt. “Are we safe from those tendrils at this distance?”
“As usual, I have scrambled force fields for radio-astro-camouflage purposes,” said the sub-lieutenant. “We are maintaining distance and being judicious with sensor reads. So far there is no indication that we’ve been detected in any way.”
“Well, clearly the Leviathan was detected,” said Sutt. “And captured as well. What can sensors tell us about the interior of the alien vessel?”
“The readings are confused. Strangely, we’re having a hard time picking up life signs. With the ship’s grip on the Leviathan, you’d think there would be someo
ne at the controls. But we’re only picking up three biological forms—and some kind of background energy. Other than that, nobody. Or nobody alive.”
Sutt frowned. “What—our quarry is dead?”
“I did not say that. A cursory scan of the Leviathan itself reveals two life forms.”
“Hmm. So two are there on board the Leviathan—and the others are on the unknown vessel—or dead. I like those odds. Continue monitor scanning.” She turned to the navigator. “What have you got so far from the computer banks?”
“We’ve scanned and done comparisons and I’m showing positives, Captain. I think we’ll have something in just a moment.”
Sutt nodded. “Excellent. Good work.” She tapped the hard shell of her leg. A staccato dance of fingers. A habit. Inside, Sutt was thrilled. This was far better than she could possibly have hoped. Not only had her quarry been halted in its escape, but there, before her, was an unknown. And the Peacekeepers tended to profit from unknowns. All signs pointed to the conclusion that this thing was the product of a new race. When the Peacekeepers encountered a new race, their valiant forces were able to bring order and meaning to a species that had known only the chaos of freedom—and, most important, the Peacekeepers always profited from the new technology the aliens brought.
Sutt was given very little time to muse further before the screens started flashing with new output. The navigator leaned forward. “Captain, I believe we have something here. We’ve not only been cross-referencing history but myths and legends from all cultures that our people have brought peace to. What is coming up, sir, is bits and pieces about a truly ancient race who once plied the galactic starways.”
“Myths? Legends? We’re in greater need of solid information right now.”
“There are strong indications that these myths are more like history, Captain,” said the navigator. “And they are myth only in that there has been no verified evidence to support them. Until now.”
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