Minda wondered if this was true, or just some kind of creation myth. But the murmuring words were comforting.
‘My home Conurbation is near a ruined city. A bit like this one. The ruin is an old pre-Occupation city. It was called Pah-reess. Did you know that?’
‘No. It must be a wonderful place.’
She found she had reached the flitter. She was so cold she wasn’t even shivering any more. It was almost comfortable.
She couldn’t lie on the ground. But she found a way to use bits of debris from the flitter, stuck in the ice, to prop herself up without having to lean on anything. After a time it seemed easier to leave her eyes closed.
‘Your body is losing its ability to reheat itself. You must find an external source of heat. You will soon drift into unconsciousness…’
‘I’m in my eighth cadre,’ Minda whispered. ‘You have to move cadres every two years, you know. But I was chosen for my new cadre. I had to pass tests. My best friend is called Janu. She couldn’t come with me. She’s still on Earth…’ She smiled, thinking of Janu.
She felt herself tilting. She forced open her eyes, frost crackling on her eyelashes. She saw that the pretty, silvered landscape was tipping up around her. She was falling over. It didn’t seem to matter any more; at least she could let her sore muscles relax.
Somewhere a voice called her: ‘Always protect your core heat. It is the most important thing you possess. Remember…’
There was something wrong with the silver ghost, she saw, through sparkling frost crystals.
The ghost had come apart. Its silvery hide had unpeeled and removed itself like a semi-sentient overcoat. The hide fell gracelessly to the frozen ground and slithered towards her.
She shrank back, repelled.
What was left of the ghost was a mass of what looked like organs and digestive tracts, crimson and purple, pulsing and writhing, already shrivelling back, darkening. And they revealed something at the centre: almost like a human body, she thought, slick with pale pink fluid, and curled over like a foetus. But it, too, was rapidly freezing.
All around the subsiding sub-organisms, the frozen air of Snowball briefly evaporated, evoking billowing mist. And the dormant creatures of the Snowball enjoyed explosive growth: not just lichen-like scrapings and isolated flowers now, but a kind of miniature forest, trees pushing out of the ice and frosted air, straining for a black sky. Minda saw roots tangle as they dug into crevices in the ice, seeking the warmth of deeper levels, perhaps even liquid water.
But in no more than a few seconds it was over. The heat the ghost had hoarded for an unknown lifetime was lost to the uncaring stars, and the small native forest was freezing in place for another millennium of dormancy. Then the air frosted out once more.
At last Minda fell.
But there was something beneath her now, a smooth, dark sheet that would keep her from the ice. She collapsed onto it helplessly. A thick, stiff blanket stretched over her, shutting out the starry sky.
She wasn’t warm, but she wasn’t getting any colder. She smiled and closed her eyes.
When she opened her eyes again, the stars framed a Spline ship, rolling overhead, and the concerned face of her cadre leader, Bryn.
The Spline rose high, and the site of Minda’s crash dwindled to a pinpoint, a detail lost between the tracery of the abandoned city and the volcano’s huge bulk.
‘It was the motion of the vegetation that our sensors spotted,’ Bryn said. Her face was sombre, her voice tired after the long search. ‘That was what drew us to you. Not your heat, or even your ghost’s. That was masked by the volcano.’
‘Perhaps the ghost meant that to happen,’ Minda said.
‘Perhaps.’ Bryn glanced at the ghost’s hide, spread on a wall. ‘Your ghost was astonishing. But its morphology is a logical outcome of an evolutionary drive. As the sky turned cold, living things learned to cooperate, in ever greater assemblages, sharing heat and resources. The thing you called a silver ghost was really a community of symbiotic creatures: an autarky, a miniature biosphere in its own right, all but independent of the universe outside. Even the skin that saved you was independently alive … This is a new species for us. Evidently we have reached a point where two growing spheres of colonisation, human and ghost, have met. Our future encounters will be interesting.’
As the planet folded on itself, Minda saw the colony of the ghosts rising over the chill horizon. It was a forest of globes and half-globes anchored by cables; gleaming necklaces swooped between the globes. The colony, a sculpture of silver droplets glistening on a black velvet landscape, was quite remarkably beautiful.
But now a dazzling point of light rose above the horizon, banishing the stars. It was a new sun for Snowball made by humans, the first of many fusion satellites hastily prepared and launched. The ghost city cast dazzling reflections, and the silver globes seemed to shrivel back.
Bryn said, watching her, ‘Do you understand what has happened here? If the ghosts’ evolution was not competitive as ours was, they must be weaker than us.’
‘But the ghost gave me its skin. It gave its life to save me.’
Bryn said sternly, ‘It is dead. You are alive. Therefore you are the stronger.’
‘Yes,’ Minda whispered. ‘I am the stronger.’
Bryn eyed her with suspicion.
Where the artificial sun passed, the air melted, pooling and vaporising in great gushes.
After that first contact, two powerful interstellar cultures cautiously engaged. One man, called Jack Raoul, played a key role in developing a constructive relationship.
To understand the creatures humans came to know as ‘Silver Ghosts’ – so Raoul used to lecture those who were sceptical about the mission that consumed his life – you had to understand where they came from.
After the Ghosts watched their life heat leak away to the sky, they became motivated by a desire to understand the fine-tuning of the universe. As if they wanted to fix the design flaws that had betrayed them.
So they meddled with the laws of physics. This made them interesting to deal with. Interesting and scary.
Relationships deepened. The ‘Raoul Accords’ were established to maintain the peace, and give humans some say in the Ghosts’ outrageous tinkering with the universe.
But times changed. The Coalition tightened its grip on human affairs.
Three centuries after Minda, there was rising friction between Ghost and human empires. And Jack Raoul found himself out of favour.
THE COLD SINK
AD 5802
‘I called on Jack Raoul at the time appointed, acting in my capacity as a representative of the Supreme Court of the Third Expansion. Raoul submitted himself to my custody without complaint or protest.
‘I must record that the indignity of the armed escort, as ordered by the court, only added to the cruelty of the procedure I was mandated to perform.’
It was as if somebody had called his name.
He was alone in his Virtual apartment – drinking whisky, looking out at a fake view of the New Bronx, missing his ex-wife – alone in a home become a gaol, in fact. Now he looked to the door.
Maybe they’d come to get him already. He felt his remote heart beat, and his mood of gloomy nostalgia gave way to hard fear. Don’t let ’em see they’ve won, Jack.
With a growl, he commanded the door to open.
And there, instead of the surgeons and Commission goons he had expected, was a Silver Ghost: a spinning, shimmering bauble as tall as Raoul, crowding the dowdy apartment-block corridor. It was intimidating close to in this domestic environment, like some huge piece of machinery. In its mirrored epidermis he could see his own gaunt Virtual face. An electromagnetic signature was quickly overlaid for him – Ghosts looked alike only in normal human vision – but he would have recognised his visitor anyhow.