“You don’t want to be with me.”
“No, I don’t,” Mara said. “But it’s my duty to host you. And it’s your duty to understand what we’re doing here on Pluto—”
“Don’t talk to me about duty.”
“ — even if that means you’re going to have to confront your feelings about the Silver Ghosts.”
“Why have I got to ’confront my feelings?’ “ he snapped. “The Ghosts shouldn’t be here. That isn’t a feeling. It’s a fact.”
“What are you scared of?” she asked blandly.
“That’s a stupid question.”
She didn’t react. “It probably is. Will you come?”
He sighed. It was her, or Draq’s partial, differential equations. “All right.”
Suited up, they walked out of the dome. Mara led him perhaps half a kilometer away from the domes of the Christy compound. They didn’t speak.
Once more, the sharp-grained, ultracold frost of Pluto crunched beneath Pirius’s feet, and he tried not to be spooked by the immense mass of Charon poised silently above his head.
They crossed a low ridge, perhaps the worn-down rim of another ancient crater, and approached a new structure. It was an open tangle of cables, wiring, small modules; it looked impractical to Pirius, more like a sculpture. But it seemed oddly familiar, and he dug for the memory, left over from some long-ago training session.
Mara spoke at last. “You understand that the main Ghost reservation, which you saw, is on the far side of the planet. But it was necessary to provide support facilities for the Ghosts who work with us here, at Christy. We decided to take the opportunity to recreate another bit of Ghost technology.”
Then Pirius saw it. “This is a cruiser,” he breathed. “A Ghost cruiser.” Once, millions of ships like this had patrolled the Orion Line, the Ghosts’ great cordon flung across the face of the Galaxy.
The Ghost ship was kilometers long, big enough to have dwarfed the greenship Pirius’s future self would have piloted in the Core. It had nothing like the lines of a human craft. The cruiser was a tangle of silvery rope within which bulky equipment pods were suspended, apparently at random.
And everywhere there were Silver Ghosts, sliding along the silver cables like beads of mercury.
“Of course it’s just a mock-up,” Mara said. “Basically life support. There are no drive units; it can’t fly. And no weapons! I always think it looks more like a forest than a ship. But that’s what it is, in a sense. The Ghosts are like miniature ecologies themselves, and they turned slices of their ecology into their ships. I’ve always thought that was a much more elegant solution than our own clunky mechanical systems.”
Pirius felt that deep anger welling again. “Millions of human lives were lost in the defeat of ships like this. And you’ve built a, a monument to our enemy.”
“Yes,” she said testily. “As you’ve said before. But don’t you think we need to understand what it was we killed?”
He thought he didn’t understand her at all. “Is that why you’re here? Were you always so curious about Ghosts?”
She hesitated, perhaps wary of giving away too much of herself. “I suppose so — yes. I’ve always been a Commissary. I started in the Office of Doctrinal Responsibility: very dry work! I was always blighted by curiosity. Not a good characteristic in the Commission for Historical Truth.” Her smile, behind her visor, was thin. “Then I found out about this facility, and a number of others, where life- forms generally supposed lost during the Assimilation have been preserved — or, as in the case of the Ghosts, revived.”
“There are others?… Never mind. How did you find out?”
She smiled again. “The control of the Commission isn’t as complete as some like to imagine. Truth finds a way. So I volunteered to come here. The powers that be were surprised, but they processed my application. Pluto is generally a punishment detail, you know. You come here to make amends, to end your career — certainly not to progress it.”
“And was it worth it?”
“Oh, yes, Ensign. It was worth it.” She led him around the periphery of the mocked-up cruiser. “I mean, look at this. What’s fascinating about the Ghosts to me isn’t their technological capabilities but their story: their origin, their account of themselves. You know, the Ghosts call the sky the Heat Sink — the place the heat went.” Since their world had frozen, Mara said, the Ghosts had not been shaped by competitive evolution, as humans had, but by cooperation. “They are symbiotic creatures. They derive from life-forms that huddled into cooperative collectives as their world turned cold. Every aspect of their physical design is about conserving heat, precious heat.
“And they seem to be motivated not by expansion for its own sake, as we are, but by a desire to understand the fine-tuning of the universe. Why are we here? You see, Ensign Pirius, there is only a narrow range of physical possibilities within which life of any sort is possible. We think the Ghosts were studying this question by pushing at the boundaries — by tinkering with the laws which govern us all.”
“But that made them dangerous.”
“Yes,” Mara said. “An enemy who can use the laws of physics as a weapon is formidable. But they developed their capabilities, not as some vast weapons program, but for their own species imperative. Until they ran up against humans, it had nothing to do with us…”
Pirius sensed movement behind him. A Silver Ghost hovered massively, a few meters away, just above the ice surface.
Mara said quickly, “It’s only the Sink Ambassador. It must have followed us. It’s probably curious.”
“Curious? You talk as if it’s a child.” Pirius saw himself reflected in the Ghost’s complacent hide. “You,” he said. “You are the Sink Ambassador?”
“That is what I am called.”
“Is she right? That you Ghosts follow your own logic, that you care nothing for humans?”
“I don’t know,” the Ghost said. “I have no reliable data on the past.”
Mara said dryly, “These new Ghosts won’t believe a word we say about their history. Maybe they’re right not to.”
“We destroyed you,” Pirius said. “And we brought you back. Everything about you is in our power.”
“True. But that doesn’t alter my perception of you.”
Fists clenched, Pirius stepped up to the Ghost. Suddenly all the complex emotions he had been feeling — his inbred hatred of the Ghosts, his confusion at the reaction of Mara and the others, all that had struck him so overwhelmingly since the day his own future self had docked at Arches — welled up in him. And here was a Silver Ghost, right in front of him. He said on impulse, “Perhaps Mara is right. Perhaps I must learn about you, as you have learned about humans.”
Mara was disturbed. “What are you doing, Ensign?”
“Remove your hide. Disassemble yourself. Show me what you are.”
Mara laid a gloved hand on Pirius’s arm. Her eyes were bright with anger. “I knew I shouldn’t have brought you here.”
Pirius shook her off. “I command this Ghost. I am human.”
The Ghost was motionless, save for its usual subtle wafting, and Pirius, shaking with anger, wondered what he would do if the Ghost refused. He remembered his training on how to fight a Ghost. That hide was tough, but if you used all your strength you could get your knife into it, and then you could use the Ghost’s own rotation against it and open it up…
The Ghost’s hide puckered, and shallow seams formed, stretching from one pole of the glistening sphere to another, segmenting the surface. The Ghost quivered briefly — then one seam split open. A sheet of crimson fluid gushed out, strikingly like human blood. It had frozen into crystals long before it fell to the Pluto ice.