'You will have to be the mother now,' he said. 'Can you help us? Can you be the mother?'
The girl ran to the end of the garden and cried. She didn't want to be anyone's mother. She wanted someone to be hers. If this event was part of a life, she didn't like it. She didn't trust a life like that. It would all come to nothing. She ran up and down the garden with her arms out to the sides making loud noises until her brother laughed and joined in, and the father came out and made her look into his sad brown eyes and asked her again if she would be the mother. She looked away from him as hard as she could. She knew how big a mistake he had made: if it's hard to get away from a photograph, it's harder still to get away from a smell.
'We could have her back,' she suggested. 'We could have her back as a cultivar. It's easy. It would be easy.'
The father shook his head. He explained why he wouldn't want that. 'Then I won't be her,' the little girl said. 'I'll be something better.'
The mathematics hid them nicely. It even found a sun, small, G-type, a bit tired, but with a row of planets that gleamed in the distance like portholes in the night.
What was memorable about the system, which was called Perkins' Rent, was the train of alien vehicles that hung nose to tail in a long cometary orbit which at aphelion was halfway to the next star. They were between a kilometre and thirty kilometres long, with hulls as tough and thick as rinds, coloured a kind of lustreless grey, shaped as randomly as asteroids-potato shapes, dumb-bell shapes, off-centre shapes with holes in them-and every one under two feet of the sifted-down dust blown out of some predictable and not very recent stellar catastrophe. The dust of life, though there was no life here. Whoever they belonged to abandoned them before proteins appeared on Earth. Their vast nautiloid internal spaces were as clean and empty as if nothing had ever lived there. Every so often part of the train fell into the sun, or ploughed ship by ship into the methane seas of the system's gas giant: but once it had been perfect.
The ghost train was the economic mainstay of Perkins' Rent. They mined those ships like any other kind of resource. Nobody knew what they did, or how they got here, or how to work them; so they cut them up and melted them down, and sold them via a subcontractor to some corporate in the Core. It made a local economy.
It was the simple, straight-line thing to do. The used-up ones were surrounded by unpredictably shifting clouds of scrap: cinders, meaningless internal structures made of metals no one wanted or even understood, waste product from the automatic smelters. The White Cat found a snug place in one of these clouds, where the smallest individual unit was two or three times her size. She gave herself up to the chaotic attractor, shut down her engines and was instantly lost: a statistic. Seria Mau Genlicher woke up in a fury from her latest dream, opened a line to the supercargo.
'This is where you get off,' she told them.
She dumped their equipment from the hold and then opened the human quarters to the vacuum. The air made a thick whistling noise as it blew out. Soon the K-ship had a little cloud of its own, comprised of frozen gases, luggage, and bits of clothing. Among this floated five bodies, blue, decompressed. Two of them had been fucking and were still joined together. The clone was the hardest to get rid of. She clung on to the furniture, screaming, then clamped her mouth shut. The air roared past her, but she wouldn't give up and be evacuated. After a minute, Seria Mau felt sorry for her. She closed the hatches. She brought the human quarters back up to pressure.
'There are five bodies out there,' she told the mathematics. 'One of the men must have been a clone, too.'
No answer.
The shadow operators hung in corners with their hands over their mouths. They turned their heads away.
'Don't look at me like that,' Seria Mau told them. 'Those people brought some kind of transponder on board here. How else could we have been followed?'
'There was no transponder,' said the mathematics.
The shadow operators shifted and streamed like weed under water, whispering, 'What has she done, what has she done?' in soft, fey, papery voices. 'She has killed them all,' they said. 'Killed them all.'
Seria Mau ignored them.
'There must have been something,' she said.
'Nothing,' the mathematics promised her. 'Those people were just people.'
'But-'
'They were just people,' the mathematics said.
'Come on,' said Seria Mau after a moment. 'No one's innocent.'
The clone was crouched in a corner. The drop in air pressure had ripped most of her clothes off, and she was squatting with her arms wrapped round her upper body. Her skin had a hectic, wealed look where the evacuating air had scraped it. Here and there along her thin, ribby sides, blackish bruises showed where things had bounced off her on their way out into space. Her eyes were glazed and puzzled, full of a hysteria she was holding in place out of shock, puzzlement, failure to quite appreciate how much had happened. The cabin smelled of lemons and vomit. Its walls were scarred where fixtures and fittings had ripped loose. When Seria Mau spoke, the clone stared round in a panicky way and tried to force herself further into the corner.
'Leave me alone,' she said.
'Well they're dead now,' Seria Mau said.
'What?'
'Why did you let them treat you like that? I watched. I watched the things they did to you.'
'Fuck you,' said the clone. 'I can't believe this. I can't believe some fucked-up machine is giving me a lecture, that just killed everyone I know.'
'You let them use you.'
The clone hugged herself tighter. Tears rolled down either side of her nose. 'How can you say that? You're just some fucking machine.'
She said: 'I loved them.'
'I'm not a machine,' Seria Mau said.
The clone laughed.
'What are you then?' she said.
'I'm a K-captain.'
The clone got a disgusted, tired expression on her face. 'I'd do anything not to end up like you,' she said.
'So would I,' said Seria Mau.
'Are you going to kill me now?'
'Would you like me to?'
'No!'
The clone touched her bruised lip. She looked bleakly around the cabin. 'I don't suppose any of my clothes survived,' she said. Suddenly, she began to shiver and weep silently. 'They're all out there, aren't they? With my friends? All my good clothes!"
Seria Mau turned the cabin temperature up.
'The shadow operators can fix that,' she said offhandedly. 'Is there anything else I can do for you?'
The clone considered this.
'You can take me somewhere where there are real people,' she said.
The occupied planet of the system was called Perkins IV, though its inhabitants referred to it as New Midland. It had been terraformed, after a fashion. It had an agriculture based on traditional principles, some FTZ-style assembly plants in closed compounds, and two or three towns of fifty or sixty thousand people, all on one peneplained continent in the Northern Hemisphere. The agriculture ran to beet and potatoes, plus a local variety of squash which had been marketed successfully further up the Beach until some cutter worked out how to do it cheaper; which had been the fate of traditionally based agricultures for three and a half centuries. The biggest town ran to cinemas, municipal buildings, churches. They thought of themselves as ordinary people. They didn't do much tailoring, out of a vague sense of its unnaturalness. They had a religion less bleak than matter-of-fact. At the school they taught about the ghost train and how to mine it.
The first Monday of an early, squally spring, some of the younger children were playing a game of 'I went to the particle market and I bought… '
They had got as far as '… a Higgs boson, some neutral K mesons, and a long-lived neutral kaon which decayed into two pions by CP-violating processes,' when a single flat concussion rattled the windows and a matt-grey wedge-shaped object, covered all over in intakes, dive brakes and power bulges, shot across the town a hundred feet up and stopped inside its own length. It was the White Cat. The children rushed to the schoolhouse windows, shouting and cheering.