by Doyle, Debra
“Do you think I’m going crazy?” she said at last.
Faral pulled a sip of cha’a before answering. “No more than the rest of us. Why?”
“I didn’t used to believe in ghosts. Now I’m not so sure.”
“The Adepts tell all kinds of strange stories,” he said. “And the Mages tell even stranger ones. What’s got you worried?”
“It’s Guislen,” she said. “I know your cousin trusts him and all that … but I’ve been wondering about him ever since before we left Sapne. And I think that he’s a ghost.”
She help up her hand to forestall a reply. “Listen. First, he shows up while we’re inhaling that incense at the passport office, and he never does explain where he came from. Next, he just happens to know where this ship is—a ship that’s almost a century out of date—and he also just happens to be an expert on flying it.”
“Nothing so mysterious about that,” Faral said. “There’s a lot of antique ships still around and working. By the time we reach Khesat you’ll be the same kind of expert that he is. And you sure aren’t a ghost.”
She gave a nervous laugh. “I don’t think I am, anyhow. And I’m fairly sure about you and your cousin. But Guislen … the ship’s lockplate recognized his hand.”
“I saw that,” Faral admitted. “But if he’s an Adept, or even Adept-trained, the lockplate would open for him regardless. My mother can do the same thing, and I know that she isn’t a ghost.”
Miza reddened. She’d forgotten that Faral’s mother was the Mistress Hyfid who’d abandoned her Adept’s training to become First of all the Mage-Circles, and that his uncle was the Master of the Guild. For all his comforting matter-of-factness, he was probably accustomed to seeing marvels and apparitions every time he turned around.
Still, she felt compelled to keep on with her argument. “There were two crew members,” she said. “Guislen and that thing in the clearing make two ghosts. And there’s other stuff. I’ve counted the rations here in the galley. I know how many packets there were when we started, and how many packets there are now. I can account for the ones that you’ve eaten, and the ones I’ve eaten, and the ones that Jens has eaten. And that’s it. Guislen hasn’t eaten anything at all since we’ve been aboard.”
“Are you sure?”
“I spent the past six months learning how to take inventory,” she said. “And I know how to count. I’m sure.”
“That is odd, then.” Faral frowned at the lid of his zero-g cup. “Thing is, I saw Guislen twice before we ever got to Sapne. Once on board Bright-Wind-Rising, and once on Ophel.”
“Did you touch him?”
He glanced up at her sharply. “Did I what?”
“Touch him.” She tapped the back of Faral’s hand by way of demonstration. His flesh was warm against hers in the chilly recirculated air. “I’ll bet that you didn’t.”
“Well … no.”
“You can’t. I’ve tried. He’s always someplace else by the time you get there—so smooth, you wouldn’t notice he’d done it if you weren’t already waiting for it to happen. I’ve never seen him asleep. I’ve never had to wait for him to get out of the ’fresher. And I’ve never seen him do anything mechanical, either. He always asks one of us to turn any knobs that need turning or push any buttons that need pushing. He’s never touched any of them himself that I could see.”
From Faral’s expression, she gathered that he was going over his own experiences with Guislen and comparing them with hers. At last he said, “You may be right.”
“I know I’m right,” she said firmly.
“Suppose that he really is a ghost,” Faral said. “The big question then is, why is he bothering to do all this?”
“Wrong,” she said. “The big question is, how much does your cousin know?”
The number-one cargo bay aboard Dust Devil was chilly and full of echoes. Amaro had lifted from Ophel with only a partial load—intending, Blossom supposed, to make up the difference at the far end with exotic goods picked up cheap on Sapne. The captain had an eye for bits of primitive artwork that would appeal to the dilettanti on places like Khesat and Ovredis, and he’d made a profit from such things before.
But not any longer, Blossom thought. Not if we’re right about what happened on Sapne.
She looked at the other two people in the cargo bay: her partner Bindweed and the Dusty’s navigator and pilot-apprentice Trav Esmet. Trav seemed uneasy. The cargo bay was a good place to have a conversation without being overheard, but there was no telling who might have snoop-buttons planted anywhere—and a late-night summons to a clandestine meeting with the ship’s owners was enough to make any spacer nervous.
What they had to talk about wasn’t going to make Trav any happier, either. But there wasn’t any point in delay.
“We’ve been in hyper for a week now,” she said. “And we’ve been watching Amaro the whole time. What do both of you think?”
“I’m concerned,” Trav said. “We’re talking about the captain. Isn’t that mutiny?”
Bindweed gave him a pitying glance. “My dear boy, we own this ship. The captain serves at our pleasure. Whether we are pleased or not … you’ve known him on a day-to-day basis far longer than we have. Has he been in any way odd?”
“He hasn’t been off the bridge since we left,” Trav said. “Look, I’m very uncomfortable with this. Leave me out of the rest of it, all right?”
He turned and walked quickly from the cargo bay without saying anything more.
Blossom watched him go, then looked back at her partner. “That leaves us to make a determination.”
Bindweed shrugged. “You knew that it would. Why you even bothered—”
“It never hurts to observe proper form,” Blossom said. “Even in a crisis, which is what we’ve got. It’s not just that Amaro knew our true names, it’s that he sent us off to the guns as if this were the ’Hammer from fifty years back. So if he isn’t Amaro any longer—who is he?”
“Who was on Warhammer in those days?” Bindweed asked. “Jos, Errec, and Ferrda. You and me. ’Rada. A few others, on and off. Of the ones who flew, Jos and Errec.”
“And Jos is still alive, or was the last time I heard.”
“So,” said Bindweed. “Errec.”
Blossom nodded. She’d known in her heart what the answer had to be, but knowing the answer didn’t make reaching a decision any easier. “He always was the one who could go right inside someone’s mind. And being dead isn’t likely to matter as much to him as it would to some people.”
Bindweed started pacing, always a sign that she was thinking hard. “Let’s go over the options. Suppose I walk up to Captain Amaro in the common room after breakfast and say, ‘I believe that you’re Errec Ransome.’ Either the good captain says ‘Yes’ or he says ‘No’—”
“Or else he says, ‘Gentlelady, you must be joking,’ and never answers you outright at all. Which is what Amaro would say if you asked him, and exactly what Errec would say if he didn’t want to give you a straight answer. Do you really have any doubt about who’s walking around inside that body?”
Bindweed didn’t need to shake her head. Her expression was answer enough. “Do we stop him, then?”
“Stop him from what?” Blossom tapped the grip of her blaster—a nervous habit she thought she’d shed during the years on Ophel. Hah. Bring back the old ways, and all the old twitches come back right along with them. “We haven’t got the faintest idea what he’s planning to do.”
“Then all we can do ourselves,” said Bindweed finally, “is watch. And be ready to help out our shipmate if we can.”
The Light continued its hyperspace transit to Khesat. Frustrated that her late-night conversation with Faral Hyfid-Metadi hadn’t arrived at any useful conclusion, Miza kept on watching Jens and Guislen both. Neither one of them, however, did anything outside the already-established shipboard routine. Eventually Miza relaxed her scrutiny and went back to reading the ship’s logbooks.
The old G
ryfferan Elevener had plenty of them for her to choose from, kept mostly on pad-readable datachips and stored in the same drawer as the coursebooks. She’d found a working datapad in there as well, and she used it—as other crew members would have before her—to read and annotate the logs.
She took the entries in the order she found them, the most recent first—“Today Winzie died. May his spirit find peace”—and working backward. Some of them were in Ilarnan or other languages she couldn’t read, but all the ones she could read had a sameness to them: cargoes, prices, ports of call, encounters with other ships. The condition of the engines. Costs for maintenance. Captain Veybesht of Inner Light had been particularly careful with that.
I wonder if our Gentlesir Guislen went by the name of Veybesht when he was alive, Miza thought. Or was he Winzie?
She kept on reading. The line of entries stretched backward in time. The last captain of Inner Light had taken over when the previous skipper had earned enough for a stake as a dirtside merchant—“And the only time I’ll see the stars is when I go to bed late, but at least in my own bed.” Crew members came and crew members went. Cargoes stayed more or less the same for run after run.
You’re an analyst, Miza told herself. You take facts and see the patterns in them that others can’t. These are facts. Analyze them.
She entered a note to herself in the margin of the data display, and read on.
The log was long on descriptions of gravity wells and short on descriptions of crew. Sometimes the Light had flown with two crew members aboard, sometimes with three—a relative luxury that allowed for one crew member on watch, one on non-flight-related duties, and one on free time. Normally, though, the Elevener’s two crew members stood watch and watch, one on duty and one off. And the log entries went on and on.
“Entered hyperspace, bound for Ghan Jobai. All normal.”
“Fueled. Costs higher on Pleyver since last visit.”
“Navicomp upgrade completed, chipset serial number 151908 installed.”
“Feguot of Andera has put out a call for crallach meat, bonus to fastest delivery.”
“Engineer Wielk paid off, one share of mess fund reimbursed. Hired new engineer, Oredost. Bought into mess.”
Line after line, Miza scrolled through the log. Then, without warning, she came to a name she recognized.
“Navigator Ransome paid off. Departs for the Guildhouse on Ilarna. We wish him well.”
Miza closed her eyes.
Ransome the traitor. Errec Ransome, who was pointed out to schoolchildren from one side of the civilized galaxy to the other as the proximate cause of the Second Magewar. Ransome the Adept.
Guislen was an Adept too.
She continued on to the end of the log, and the day when the ship had first come into service. No other name struck her. She’d found the connection that she knew had to exist.
Letting the datapad drift aside, she floated free of her chair and stretched. Now what should I do? she wondered.
Tell Faral, of course. That was easy. And Jens. Let them know who had brought them this far—a man famous for villainy while he was alive. What would someone like that stick at now once he was dead?
She found Faral and Jens together in the engineering spaces. Like Miza, they were using their spare time and the ship’s old manuals to learn the system. They had several plates removed from the overhead, and Jens was floating near the opening and checking the components while Faral read out the specs from a datapad down below. They looked in Miza’s direction as she came gliding in.
“I think I know who our fourth companion is,” she began, “and you aren’t going to like it.”
Jens went on tracing a wiring conduit in the overhead with his finger. “So—are you going to tell us?”
She drew a deep breath. “I think he’s Errec Ransome. The traitor.”
“Granda never would let us talk about Ransome like that,” Faral said. “Whenever the subject came up, he always said, ‘What’s done is done, and Errec was my friend.’”
“Whatever,” said Miza impatiently. “But he was also the navigator on Inner Light before he got paid off and went to join the Adepts.”
“Maybe you’re right and there’s a connection,” said Faral. “Or maybe there isn’t. What’s important is that Guislen is here now, and that he’s helped us. Do you want to be the one who tells him, ‘By the way, you’re the most hated man in the known universe’?”
“No.” She shook her head. The motion made her float away from Faral at a slight angle, and almost bump into Jens. “But I don’t think I’ll sleep again while he’s here.”
“The galaxy is full of dead bad men,” Jens said, “and dead good ones too. Sooner or later everyone sleeps.”
He twisted to look directly downward into Miza’s eyes. “Whoever Guislen is, or whatever, he’s my friend. To be frank, Gentlelady, I’ve known him longer than I’ve known you. I don’t ask you to like it. But you are going to have to settle your mind to it.”
He turned back to his tracing of the circuits.
Miza was silent, waiting for Faral to say something. When he didn’t, only gave a helpless shrug, she felt her eyes begin to sting. She wiped her eyes with her shirtsleeve—on top of everything else, she didn’t need the humiliation of seeing her tears float loose in free-fall—and fled for the sanctuary of the Light’s cockpit.
Once she got there, she dogged the door shut behind her, secured herself in the command chair, then pressed her face against the acceleration padding and wept. After a while, through her sobs, she heard a voice speaking her name.
“Mizady Lyftingil,” it said quietly. “When you named me, I knew. You are right. I should go.”
She opened her eyes again. She was alone in the cockpit, and the door behind her was still dogged down.
Several hours passed. Miza didn’t much want to leave Inner Light’s cockpit. She knew in her heart that when she did, she’d find no trace of Guislen, or of Errec Ransome, anywhere on board the ship—and now that her naming of him had driven him away, she found the thought of finishing the transit without him almost as unsettling as she had found his presence earlier. Whatever else Ransome might have been and done, he’d made a good teacher in the basics of crewing an antique spacecraft.
Now there’s just the three of us.
That, too, was a depressing thought. Jens Metadi-Jessan had called Guislen a friend, and he wasn’t going to be happy when he found out that his friend was gone. It wouldn’t take him long to decide that Miza was to blame, either, and then she could say good-bye to whatever traces of uneasy fellowship they might have had.
And Faral goes where Jens says to follow. That thought was even more depressing.
She sat up straighter—or would have, if she’d been actually sitting, and not just anchored to the Light’s command couch by the safety webbing. It doesn’t matter if neither one of them is speaking to you, she told herself. Once you’ve gotten them safely to Khesat, you’ve taken care of Huool’s commission and can go back to Ophel.
With that-decision behind her, it was easier to unbuckle the webbing and open the door. She couldn’t have stayed inside forever anyway—as a place to withstand a siege, the Light’s cockpit lacked some of the basic requirements, food and water being only two of them.
All the same, she was relieved to see that no one was waiting for her outside the cockpit door. She made her way aft to the ’fresher, then forward again toward the galley.
A cup of cha’a, she thought, then to the cockpit to get some sleep. Maybe things will look better in the morning.
The galley wasn’t empty. Faral was there already, with a zero-g cha’a cup in either hand. He looked like he was about to leave; she pushed herself backward out of the door to clear the way for him. To her surprise, he didn’t go on past her, but stayed where he was and held out one of the zero-g cups like a peace offering.
“I was going to bring one up to you,” he said. “I thought you might want it.”
“Th
anks.” Miza took the cup and sipped at it. Maybe she was getting used to the wretched quality of space rations in general, but the cha’a didn’t taste half-bad. “Where’s your cousin?”
“Down in the cargo hold. He said he was damned if he was going to sleep in crew berthing anymore.”
“Oh.” She took another sip of the cha’a. “Frankly, I can see his point. I’m surprised he held out this long.”
“Me too.” Faral didn’t say anything for a while. Then he said, “We looked all over the ship for Guislen.”
“And you didn’t find any trace of him. Right?”
“Right. Jens isn’t real happy right now.”
“I don’t blame him,” she said. “Not really. I’m sorry I ever—”
“It isn’t your fault. All you did was tell the truth.” There was another awkward pause. Then Faral seemed to make up his mind about something. He gestured with his free hand at the door of the galley nook. “Sit out in the common room for a while?”
After the emotions of the past few hours, the friendly invitation almost undid her all over again. She kept herself from sniffling—she was not going to go all weepy at the slightest provocation!—and said, as lightly as she could manage, “Sure.”
The bolted-down table in the common room wasn’t any good without proper gravity. Miza suspected that its main use had been as a surface for doing dirtside paperwork with port officials the captain didn’t want going any farther into the ship. However, the shipwrights who designed the old Gyfferan Elevener had provided the compartment with plenty of handholds and gripping bars. She and Faral found a couple near the table to wrap their legs around for anchors—as close to sitting anywhere as they were likely to get until the Light made planetfall on Khesat.
Neither one of them said anything for a while. Faral was a good person to sit and be quiet with, Miza decided. And having another person nearby made the Light’s chilly silences a great deal easier to bear. She decided that she felt sorry for Jens, down by himself in the cargo hold.