Xeelee Redemption

by Baxter, Stephen

  Boldly, with her free hand, she poked the Ghost in the equator of its spinning bulk. ‘You’re not a projection.’ She laughed, disrespectful. ‘How did you get through the door?’

  ‘We have modes of transport which are beyond—’

  ‘Do you always snoop like this?’ Nicola moved closer to its heavy bulk. ‘Do you have no respect? No pity? After a thousand years—’

  ‘What is a thousand years to us?’

  ‘Today I learned that you Ghosts worship that which destroys you.’ She pointed at Jophiel. ‘Worship him, then.’

  The Ghost paused, as if considering. Then it said, ‘Yes. You, the Poole. In another reality, so it seems, you humans would crush us. Drive us to near-extinction. Subjugate us to the extent that we would worship you. Well – here, humanity is scattered and helpless. If you think what we have done here is cruel – it was not intentional – perhaps on this world at least we have already extracted forty generations’ worth of revenge for your own epochal crime.’

  And Nicola smiled coldly. ‘Revenge?’

  Jophiel had flown warships with Nicola from the surface of the Moon. He knew that expression. ‘Nicola, no—’

  ‘This is revenge.’

  She plunged the flower’s hull-plate blades, sharper than any knife, into the belly-equator of the Ghost.

  The huge sphere, weighing a tonne mass, shuddered and rolled. Nicola, clinging with both hands to the cylindrical base of the Xeelee flower, was thrown off her feet and slammed against a hull-plate wall. But she braced with both feet against the wall, and held her position. The Ghost rolled desperately, but succeeded only in dragging its own silver flesh past the blade, and as Nicola held her weapon steady a deep slice was ripped through that fine carapace. The flesh separated around the gash, and something like blood spilled out, viscous and hot – and then what looked like organs, lumpy ropes, tumbling from the wound.

  Nicola screamed defiance. ‘There he is! There is Michael Poole! Worship him, your Destroyer God! Worship him! . . .’

  Harris raced towards the fight, whether to help Nicola or to drag her away Jophiel wasn’t sure.

  But then more Ghosts appeared in the room. Simply appeared: they were not there, then they were there. Hanging in the air like grotesque chandeliers.

  One of them slammed into Harris’s back, knocking him down.

  Two others headed for Nicola.

  And another swept over Jophiel’s Virtual form, engulfing him in darkness.

  Harris, Jophiel and Susan were taken back to the Island lifedome. Nicola was not returned.

  It would be three months before a Ghost spoke to any of them again.

  19

  It happened at the beginning of the ship’s day.

  The changeover of watches was going through as smoothly as usual. In the amphitheatre at the heart of the lifedome, the small band of Gourd descendants were beginning the cycle of their own day too, of therapy, medical checks, gentle conversations with the Island folk, all under the supervision of Harris Kemp and the ship’s other medical seniors. The Gourd folk kept wandering off, however. Weeks after they had been brought into the lifedome, they still seemed fascinated by the grass and flowers and trees – though the dome’s parkland was not as it had been; the Ghosts had taken, with Jophiel’s reluctant acquiescence, swathes of grassland, samples of chickens, even rats. Just as they had once raided the Gourd.

  The beginning of the day. The handover from the night watch to the first day watch.

  That was when the Ghost appeared in the air, in the officer suite under the apex of the Island’s lifedome.

  Jophiel, Asher, Harris hurried up to the office to meet it. When they got there Jophiel glared at the Ghost. ‘Where is Nicola Emry?’

  No answer.

  ‘Are you the one who called itself the Ambassador?’

  ‘The question has no real meaning.’

  ‘Nor does your answer,’ Jophiel growled.

  Harris murmured to Jophiel, ‘It’s probably telling the truth. Ghosts are composite creatures. Surely you could replace its hide, for instance, without changing its sense of self significantly. Their identities may be impermanent. Even shareable. If Nicola were here she’d probably quote the ship of Theseus at us.’

  The Ghost observed, ‘You have no crew member named Theseus.’

  A stiff silence.

  Harris stepped forward. ‘I am in charge of medicine, among the crew here. I want to thank you for allowing us to bring the Gourd crew into this lifedome, so that we could care for them.’

  ‘Our intention is not harm,’ the Ghost said blandly. ‘It has never been harm. We are here today to invite you to witness our stellar destabilisation project.’

  Jophiel frowned. ‘What is the stellar destabilisation project? Why should we care about it?’

  ‘Come with me, Jophiel Poole. You will learn. Your reaction will be interesting. Choose a companion.’

  ‘I choose Nicola Emry.’

  A silent stand-off, that stretched for long seconds.

  Asher whispered, ‘You must go, of course. We need to learn everything we can.’ She said to the Ghost, ‘I will come.’

  ‘Be ready in one hour.’ The Ghost vanished.

  Jophiel issued a rattle of the usual orders to Harris, in command pro tem.

  In particular Jophiel made sure a covert watch was always kept up on the wormhole interface, their only source of salvation. If Michael Poole had received the desperate plea for help Jophiel had sent through the wormhole to the Cauchy, he hadn’t answered yet – but then, such was the ferocious time dilation suffered now by the Cauchy, only hours had passed for Michael Poole since the abduction, while four months had passed for Jophiel. Help could come at any time – but only if it didn’t occur to the Ghosts to break up the wormhole interface.

  Then Jophiel turned his attention to this new experience. Or, perhaps, opportunity.

  Their transport was the usual kind, a relic flitter hull stripped of human propulsion capabilities and wedged inside a Ghost tangleship.

  Once aboard, Jophiel and Asher stood before a viewscreen, watching Goober c recede.

  They were told they were being taken to some kind of station, closer to the star than Mercury was to the Sun. A journey of around two astronomical units, then: twice the distance between Earth and Sun, as it had been. It would have taken a top-of-the-range GUTship like the Island several days to span such a journey, at one gravity thrust.

  But the Ghost hyperdrive took no time at all. Suddenly the face of the star loomed before them, a sea of curdled light.

  Jophiel flinched.

  Asher was captivated.

  Sunspots like whirlpools, the marks of flaws in the magnetic field. Towards one edge of the stellar disc, Jophiel saw, a tremendous flare was gathering: arches of plasma torn from the star’s upper layer and shaped by magnetic flux into fist-like coils.

  Asher held a softscreen up to the window, busily gathering data. ‘Look at it. You and Nicola saw our Sun up close . . . It was nothing like this. You can see how this star is destabilised, these huge incipient flares.’

  A tremendous tangleship drifted across the face of the star, a silhouette of rope within which silver droplets gleamed.

  Jophiel checked screens of his own. ‘That tangleship itself is the size of a small moon.’

  ‘It’s an observation station, maybe. Hovering a few thousand kilometres above the photosphere. Remember our own station? Pathetic little Larunda, a space wheel hiding in the shadow of Mercury, as near as we dared go.’

  ‘Hey, you got the job done. In the meantime, what are those?’ He pointed.

  As the Ghost ship, or station, passed across their field of view, it was releasing artefacts. A chain of silvered spheres, like the morphology of the Ghosts themselves, but much larger, each perhaps a hundred metres across. As soon as eac
h sphere was dropped it joined a rapid, coordinated descent towards the surface of the star.

  Asher studied her readouts. ‘Those are massive. A lot of heavy equipment in there . . . ’ She glanced at Jophiel, uncertain. ‘Probes?’

  ‘Maybe. They look too big for that.’ He hesitated. ‘To me that looks like a bombing run.’

  Asher frowned. ‘Maybe. Let’s review what we know. This star is unstable. You generally get a nova explosion when a star has a companion, and the lesser star, distorted by tides, sheds a mass of material onto the surface of the larger. This builds up until you get to some critical fraction – usually about one ten-thousandth of the target star’s mass – and, blam.’

  Jophiel grinned. ‘Blam?’

  She shrugged. ‘That surface junk layer starts to fuse. In a normal star all the fusion goes on in the very centre, out of sight.’

  ‘Been there, seen that, Nicola and me . . . But if it’s at the surface—’

  ‘A nova. The star’s luminosity can increase by ten thousand, a hundred thousand times. And it can last for weeks, until that unwelcome surface layer is disrupted. Then the process starts all over again, with the drizzle of more matter from the companion.’

  ‘But here there is no companion star. Just the Ghosts, and their depth charges. Are the Ghosts causing this? Deliberately perturbing this star? If so, why?’

  ‘I’m just guessing. Until we get more data—’

  ‘Well, that might be soon.’ He pointed at the scenery.

  That big tangleship still dominated the viewscreen. But now a part of that tangle had cleared, revealing a kind of tunnel into a complex interior.

  A tunnel whose mouth drew closer.

  ‘We’re being pulled in. Maybe we will be transferred from our carrier to that – station.’

  ‘This isn’t so much a docking,’ Asher said, queasy. ‘It feels like we’re being ingested, doesn’t it? Like it’s biological. Ugh. Why can’t they just have hatches and airlocks like normal people?’

  Jophiel tried to focus. ‘We may be exiting the flitter soon. Check your skinsuit, and life support. Make sure you have your softscreens and any other equipment you need. My Virtual projection unit too.’ Jophiel began to close down those aspects of the flitter under human control, essentially the life support. And he tried to send a progress report back to his crew. This wasn’t the first excursion that had been allowed beyond the Island lifedome. Sometimes such messages got through, sometimes not.

  Meanwhile, slowly, smoothly, without any sharp acceleration, the relic flitter was drawn into the ship’s knotted complexity.

  The face of the star was soon blocked from Jophiel’s view, but the splinters of its light that got through were sharp, dazzling. And, here and there Jophiel saw movement in the tangle: Ghosts sliding through the ropy structure of their ship, looking like droplets of mercury on a wire, chains of them moving between one embedded structure and another. Gradually he made out a mass ahead: smaller than most Ghost structures, a rough cylinder with a kind of spherical extrusion at the back. It was another flitter, he recognised, presumably another relic of the Gourd, taken in here and caught up in the cabling. A place where humans could live, inside this starbound tangleship.

  But Susan Chen had never mentioned humans having been taken into a star-gazing station like this before. So who was already here?

  Their own flitter nudged to a gentle conventional docking with this deep-embedded facility. Jophiel supposed he was about to find out.

  A shudder, as hatches opened. A soft hiss as pressure equalised. The two of them released their harnesses, and, sharing a glance, drifted to the hatch.

  Which slid open. To reveal a silver statue.

  ‘Hello, Jophiel.’

  The voice was the first thing Jophiel recognised. The face was unmistakable too. But it was the face of a statue carved in silver. The body seemed nude, but silvered over, the whole of it, as if dipped in mercury.

  ‘And if you’re thinking of bringing up the Mariner from Mars, Poole, don’t go there.’

  That face creased into a smile, a ghastly metallic parody.

  It was Nicola Emry.

  20

  Nicola led them into her shelter, that old flitter hull.

  Within were basic facilities. Sleeping bags hung on a wall; there was a galley, even a bathroom. Jophiel’s Virtual skin reported the presence of a breeze of circulating air, warm and pleasantly moist. A couple of guide ropes spanned the gravity-free space. But a new port had been added to the end of the hull where the flitter’s cockpit had once been – a way through to some kind of extension.

  ‘Find somewhere to put your stuff. You can see there are straps and magnetic grabs everywhere. A lot of this is here at my recommendation; they don’t have much of an intuition about how humans live. Normal humans, I mean, as opposed to Susan’s charges. And they couldn’t learn that from me, either. But at least I remember.’

  Jophiel couldn’t take his eyes off her. Deeply troubled, he wondered how she lived now, how she ate, drank, excreted.

  Even her voice was disconcerting. It sounded much as Nicola’s had, the flesh-and-blood version – her lips moved – but the sound seemed to come from her belly. He wondered how a Ghost’s voice was generated. In air, by the vibrations of some surface diaphragm, presumably, a panel in its flesh – just like Nicola, now.

  Asher seemed distressed. She pushed her way towards Nicola, arms wide.

  Nicola gently caught her by the waist. ‘Hey. Be careful. I’m a lot more massive now, with not a lot of give. Try to hug me and you’d bounce off.’

  ‘What have they done to you?’

  Jophiel said curtly, ‘You had basic medical training back in Larunda. Same as Harris. Figure it out.’

  ‘I . . . yes. Sorry.’ Asher pulled instruments from the small medical pack she carried. ‘But I’m also the kid on Larunda who packed you two up for your Sun Probe descent. You don’t forget a thing like that.’

  ‘No, you don’t.’ Nicola touched her arm with what looked like exquisite care to Jophiel, as if she was operating some heavy piece of machinery. Well, perhaps she was. ‘And I’m still me, in here.’

  Jophiel said, ‘I hate to ask. Are you sure?’

  ‘No, Jophiel, I’m not. I think so. But I would say that, wouldn’t I? Look, I think I’m – an experiment. The Ghosts wanted to see if a human could be rebuilt. The way their ancestors seem to have rebuilt themselves when their own sun died and their planet froze.’ She tapped her chest with a disconcerting knock of metal on metal. ‘Basically they put me in this shell of Ghost hide. Like the finest skinsuit in the world. And they – well, they closed off my personal life-support loops. I breathe out, the waste air gets processed inside here, I breathe in again.’

  As she spoke Jophiel found he couldn’t look away from her face. The detail. Everything was silver-plated. The inside of her mouth as she parted her lips. Her nostrils. Even her eyes, like silver sculptures. Every pore in her flesh—

  She was aware of his scrutiny.

  He tried to focus on her words. ‘The waste gets processed how?’

  ‘Well, I’m a little sketchy on the details. As far as I know there’s nothing much in here but me and some kind of enhanced blue-green algae, which lives off the carbon dioxide I breathe out, and produces the oxygen I need. The Ghosts have been studying human physiology for a thousand years, after all.

  ‘They made me self-sufficient, you see. I’m an autarky, like each and every Ghost. Independent of the rest of the universe, save for an energy flow: starlight in, waste heat out. Even the Ghosts can’t beat entropy. Well, not yet.’ She raised her hand, flexed a fist. It was as if she wore a silver glove seamlessly attached to a sleeve. ‘There are advantages. I might live for ever. Unless I persist with my habit of falling out with everyone I meet, I suppose. Perhaps this is the future of humanity – some kind of merg
er of humans with Ghosts. Interstellar symbiosis. Or maybe I’m dead already and I didn’t get the notification yet.’

  ‘Oh, you’re alive all right,’ Asher said, wielding her stethoscope. ‘I can hear a heart pumping in there. Muffled by this suit of armour. If anything it sounds more regular than it should.’

  ‘Susan would tell you the Ghosts like to experiment. They meddle with everything, from other life forms that they don’t understand, to the laws of physics themselves.’

  Asher felt Nicola’s wrist, throat, evidently looking for a pulse. ‘Maybe. It seems quite a coincidence to me that this particular Ghost experiment has to look so punitive.’

  Nicola laughed, a strange, hollow sound – the most unhuman aspect of her so far, Jophiel thought grimly, aside from the first shock at the sight of her silvered flesh. She said, ‘Punitive? I suppose so. I’d stand out in a crowd, that’s for sure.’

  Asher nodded. ‘And if you pulled a blade on a Ghost again—’

  ‘I guess they’d shut me down if I even framed the thought.’

  Jophiel blurted, ‘Was it worth it, Nicola? To defy them?’

  She smiled glacially. ‘I found a way for a human to kill a Ghost, one on one. All you need is a decent blade. That bit of knowledge is worth a life, isn’t it?’

  Asher, impulsively, reached out to hold Nicola’s silver hand. ‘Whatever they’ve done to you, Nicola, you’re still you. You haven’t lost her, Jophiel. She’s still here. I have faith in that.’

  Nicola hesitated before replying. She said softly, ‘How can you tell? I mean, they meddled with my senses. They didn’t just replicate them, my senses of sight, hearing, touch. I see things differently now. Perceive things no unmodified human has ever seen before. Doesn’t that alone make me something other than human?’

  Jophiel shrugged. ‘That’s too deep for me. So you see things differently. What things? Show us?’

  That crease of a smile. ‘Thought you’d never ask. Follow me.’

  An inner door slid aside. She led them out of the hull of the old flitter and deeper into the heart of this Ghost station.