Struck with revulsion, she stumbled to her feet. With her heat gone the life forms dwindled back. The colours leached out of the lichen-like patches, and that single flower closed, as if regretfully.
‘A strange scene,’ said the silver ghost. ‘But it is a common tactic. The living things here must endure centuries in stillness and silence, waiting a chance benison of heat – from volcanic activity, perhaps even a cometary impact. And in those rare, precious moments, they live and die, propagate and breed. Perhaps they even dream of better times in the past.’
Though she had endured orientation exercises run by the Commission for Historical Truth, Minda had never encountered an alien before. She bunched her fists. ‘Are you a Qax?’
‘…No,’ it replied, after some hesitation. ‘Not a Qax.’
‘Then what?’
Again that hesitation. ‘Our kinds have never met before. You have no name for me. What are you?’
‘I’m a human being,’ she said defiantly. She pushed out her chest; her suit was emblazoned with a green tetrahedron. ‘And this is our planet. You’ll see, when we get it sorted out. These things, these flowers and worms, cannot compete with us.’
The ghost hovered, impassive. ‘Compete?’
She swivelled her head to confront the hovering ghost. ‘All life forms compete. It is the way of things.’ But it was as if her skull was full of a sloshing liquid; she felt herself stumbling forward.
‘Try to stay upright,’ the ghost said, its voice free of inflection. ‘Your insulation is imperfect. To reduce heat loss, you must minimise your surface contact with the ice.’
‘I don’t need your advice,’ she growled. But her breath was misting, and there were tiny frost patterns in the corners of her faceplate. The cold was sharp in her nose and mouth and eyes.
The ghost said, ‘Your body is a bag of liquid water. I surmise you come from a world of high ambient temperatures. I, however, come from a world of cold.’
‘Where?’
The hovering globe’s hide was featureless, but nevertheless she had the impression that it was spinning. ‘Towards the centre of the Galaxy.’ Something untranslatable. A distance? ‘And yours?’
She knew how to find the sun from here. Minda had travelled across a hundred and fifty light years, at the edge of the great colonising bubble called the Third Expansion, towards the brilliant young stars of Scorpio and the Southern Cross. Now those dazzling beacons were easily identifiable in the sky over her head, jewels thrown against the paler wash of the Galaxy centre. To find home, all she had to do was look the other way, back the way the great fleet of Spline ships had come. The sun, Earth and all the familiar planets were therefore somewhere beneath her feet, hidden by the bulk of this frozen rock.
She was never going to see Earth again, she thought suddenly, desolately; and because this ice-block world happened to be turned this way rather than that, she would never even see the dim, unremarkable patch of sky where Earth lay.
Without thinking, she found herself looking that way. She snapped her head up. ‘I mustn’t tell you.’
‘Ah. Competition?’
Was the ghost somehow mocking her? She said sharply, ‘If we have never met before, how come I understand you?’
‘Your vessel carries a translator box. The box understands both our languages. It is of Squeem design.’
Minda hadn’t even known her flitter was equipped with a translator box. ‘It’s a human design,’ she said.
‘No,’ the ghost said gently. ‘Squeem. We have never met before, but evidently the Squeem have met us both. Ironic. It is a strange example of inadvertent cooperation between three species: Squeem, your kind, mine.’
The Squeem were the first extra-solar species humanity had encountered. They were also the first to have occupied Sol system; the Qax, soon after, had been the second. Minda had grown up understanding that the universe was full of alien species hostile to humanity. She glanced around. Were there more silver ghosts out there, criss-crossing the silent plains, their perfect reflectiveness making them invisible to her untrained eye? She tried not to betray her fear.
She asked cautiously, ‘Are you alone?’
‘We have a large colony here.’ Again that odd hesitation. ‘But I, too, am stranded in this place. I came to investigate the city.’
‘And you were caught by the volcano?’
‘Yes. What is worse, my investigation did not advance the goals of the colony.’ She sensed it was studying her. ‘You are shivering. Do you understand why? Your body knows it is losing heat faster than it is being replaced. The shivering reflex exercises many muscles, increasing heat production by burning fuel. It is a short-term tactic, but—’
‘You know a lot about human bodies.’
‘No,’ it said. ‘I know a lot about heat. I am equipped to survive in this heat-sink landscape for extended periods. You, however, are not.’
It was as if cadre-leader Bryn was lecturing her on the endless struggle that was the only future for mankind. We cannot be weak. The Qax found us weak. They enslaved us and almost wiped our minds clean. If we are unfit for this new world, we must make ourselves fit. Whatever it takes. For only the fittest survive. If she let herself die before this enigmatic silver ghost, she would be conceding the new world to an alien race.
Impulsively, she began to stalk into the shallow valley, towards the antique city. Maybe there was something there she could use to signal, or survive.
The silver ghost followed her. It swam over the ground with a smooth, unnatural ease; it was a motion neither biological nor mechanical that she found disturbing.
She pushed through snowed-out air. The cold seemed to be settling in her lungs, and when she spoke her voice quavered from shivering.
‘Why are you here? What do you want on Snowball?’
‘We are’ – a hesitant pause – ‘researchers. This world is like a laboratory to us. This is a rare place, you see, because near-collisions between stars, of the kind that hurled this world into the dark, are rare. We are conducting experiments in low-temperature physics.’
‘You’re talking about absolute zero. Everybody knows you can’t reach absolute zero.’
‘Perhaps not. But the journey is interesting. The universe was hot when it was born,’ the ghost said gently. ‘Very hot. Since then it has expanded and cooled, slowly. But it still retains a little of that primal warmth. In the future, it will grow much colder yet. We want to know what will happen then. For example, it seems that at very low temperatures quantum wave functions – which determine the position of atoms – spread out to many times their normal size. Matter condenses into a new jelly-like form, in which all the atoms are in an identical quantum state, as if lased…’
Minda didn’t want to admit she understood none of this.
The ghost said, ‘You see, we seek to study matter and energy in configurations which might, perhaps, never before have occurred in all the universe’s history.’
She clambered over low, shattered walls, favouring hands and feet which ached with the cold. ‘That’s a strange thought.’
‘Yes. How does matter know what to do, if it has never done it before? By probing such questions we explore the boundaries of reality.’
She stopped, breathing hard, and gazed up at the hovering ghost. ‘Is that all you do, this physics stuff? Do you have a family?’
‘That is … complicated. More yes than no. Do you?’
‘We have cadres. I met my parents before I left home. They were there at my Naming, too, but I don’t remember that. Do you have music?’