Xeelee: Endurance

by Stephen Baxter

  Somebody stood before him. Short, slim, a girl perhaps, wrapped in a silver suit, her visor translucent. She held a weapon, and a mass of silver cloth. She threw the cloth at him. It closed up around him, shutting out the stars.

  Air flooded into his lungs. He gasped, and nearly fell. The silver material was squirming around his body, sealing itself up, forming sleeves and leggings. A panel before his face began to clear.

  The woman’s face hovered before him. ‘If you want to live, run.’ Her voice whispered in Donn’s ears. She turned away.

  He ran, following her. But even as he staggered over the ice, utterly bewildered, the face of the girl stayed in his mind, delicate, beautiful, twisted in a snarl of anger.

  His first few steps were like trying to walk in a deflating balloon. But gradually, step by step, it got easier, because the blanket was knitting itself up around him, the seams becoming finer around his limbs, the joints at his hips, knees, shoulders, elbows becoming more flexible. It was unlike any human engineering, silvered on the outside and oddly skin-like on the inside where it was in contact with his clothes, his flesh.

  He knew what this was, what it must be. It was the hide of a Silver Ghost. And if he now possessed this hide, then surely there was a Ghost somewhere that lacked it.

  He ran on, stumbling.

  Wherever he was, gravity was high, a bit higher than the Earth standard maintained by the Reef’s inertial fields. The sky above was black, littered with stars. Most of the light came from one brilliant star directly above his head, a bright pinpoint source. Surely that was the Boss; surely he was still in the Association. It seemed brighter than he remembered, and he thought he saw a splinter of light coming from it, some immense flare. Perhaps he had come closer to the Boss, then, deeper into the Association. But other than that—

  He tripped on something, a ledge sticking out of the ice, and fell flat. He lay there, bewildered, winded.

  He lifted his head. The girl was running on. Vapour exploded upwards around her, a sparkling fountain with every footfall. ‘Wait,’ he called. ‘Please.’

  She ignored him.

  He had no choice but to follow her. He dragged himself to his feet. His chest, where he had hit the ground, felt like one vast bruise. He stumbled on.

  He came upon structures, just bits of stone wall sticking out above the ice. The remains of a city? There was nothing like a human geometry here, no right angles among these bits of straight line. And he ran through a patch of some softer frost, lying over the water ice that gathered in the lee of the low walls. It sparkled around his footfalls, evidently vaporised by waste heat. When he looked back he saw traces of green in the boot prints, which faded as suddenly as they had come.

  He came to a hole in the ground, a well, ragged and dark.

  The girl was waiting here. She said, ‘You’ve seen the flowers.’

  ‘What flowers?’

  ‘Look at this.’ She lifted something up. It was like a human arm, small, the size of a child’s, with a perfectly formed hand. Done in silver, it was like a bit of a broken statue.

  ‘It’s the arm of a Silverman,’ he said.

  ‘Correct. The one that carried you over. The little bastard got away, but I hurt him. Watch this.’ She took a knife from her belt and stabbed the arm, slitting its silver skin from the base of the wrist up through the pit of the elbow to where it had been severed. Then she hauled at the skin, briskly peeling it off. What was exposed was bloody and steaming. Without the containing skin it fell apart into individual creatures, blood-red and worm-like, some of which wriggled feebly, still alive, even as they froze. The girl dropped all this on the ground. A cloud of vapour rose up, quickly freezing to ice and falling back.

  And all around the bloody mess, green things blossomed, a kind of moss, what looked like shoots of grass, even a kind of flower that fired off seeds like a miniature cannon. But the heat was evanescent, and the living things quickly shrivelled and died.

  ‘They wait for a bit of heat. Billions of years if they have to. And when it comes they take their chances. The story of all life, isn’t it?’

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I don’t have a name.’

  He did not recognise her accent. It was flat, toneless. ‘Everybody has a name. My name is Donn Wyman.’

  ‘I only have the number the fatballs gave me. I am Sample 5A43 Stroke 7J7 Stroke—’

  ‘We call her Five,’ came a male voice, perhaps somebody down in the well. ‘Quit showing off, Five, and get down here.’

  Five grinned at Donn. ‘All right, Hama.’ She kicked apart the bloody mess on the ground and made for the hole, climbing down easily.

  Donn saw there were handholds cut into the water-ice wall. He followed with more difficulty, not trusting the grip of his Ghost-hide gloves, which continued to mould themselves around his fingers.

  Some way down they came to a membrane, stretched across the well. The girl just dropped through this, so he followed. The membrane opened up around him, clinging closely like the meniscus of some high-surface-tension fluid; it was a tight band passing up the length of his body.

  Beneath the membrane he reached the bottom of the well. He was in a kind of cellar, walled by rock – or maybe it was a natural feature, a cave. He had never visited a planet and knew nothing about rock formations. The walls were draped with silvery blankets, what looked like more Ghost hide. On some of them tetrahedrons had been crudely scribbled, the sigil of free mankind. The light came from lengths of silvery, shining cable that had been draped over the walls, crudely nailed into place: Ghost technology, evidently stolen. He saw low corridors cut into the rock, leading off into the dark.

  Evidently this was a shelter, a habitat, under the ruins of an alien city.

  And there were people here – not many, maybe a dozen. Some wore suits of Ghost hide, their hoods pushed back. Others went naked. They sat in small groups, eating from silvered bowls, or they slept on ledges. One woman nursed an infant at her breast. They were all ages, from the infant up through adulthood to old age. Some glanced incuriously at Donn, standing there in his Ghost-hide suit; others didn’t bother looking around at all.

  The girl, Five, stood before him. She had pulled back the hood of her own suit. She rapped at his translucent visor with her fingernail. ‘It’s safe to come out of there. We have warmth and air, thanks to the fatball hide panels.’

  ‘I don’t know how.’

  ‘You just pull.’

  She took hold of the hide over his cheeks, and hauled. His hood split open easily, sundering right down the middle of his visor. Warm, fuggy air washed over him; he smelled farts and sweat and piss, and a food smell, something like boiled cabbage.

  ‘Welcome to the rat-hole,’ Five said.

  With her help he pulled the rest of his suit away. When he was done, standing there in the clothes he had worn in Minda’s Saviour, a man approached him. He was naked, and Five was stripping down too. The man was short, his head shaved, and his body was scrawny, his ribs showing. He looked like a typical earthworm, Donn thought.

  ‘I am Hama Belk,’ he said. It was a Coalition accent. ‘You can see we go naked in here.’

  ‘I think I’ll keep my clothes on, for now.’

  Five shrugged. ‘Suit yourself. We don’t wear clothes because the fatballs don’t bother with clothes for their Samples, so there’s none to steal. Unless you feel like robbing a virgin Sample. That’s been known.’ Her face was as hard as her language.

  She had short-cropped blonde hair. She was slim, her body wiry and supple; it was hard to tell how old she was – no more than eighteen, nineteen surely. She had obviously been badly damaged, in her short life. Donn felt sorry for her – a ridiculous reaction in the circumstances.

  He said, ‘“Steal”? “Rob”? Is that how you live?’

  ‘This is Ghostworld. We are all escaped Samples.�
� She gestured at the nursing mother. ‘Or the children of Samples. We came here with nothing. All we have we steal from the fatballs.’

  ‘You mean the Ghosts, don’t you? And you steal what – their very hides?’

  Five snapped, ‘We have a way of things here, virgin. You were saved by a Ghost hide. Now you must save in turn. You must kill a fatball and strip it of its hide, when you get the chance. Carry it with you, and save another if you can.’

  He recoiled. ‘I work with Ghosts. Look, my name is Donn Wyman. I work as a factor on the Reef – that is, I develop trading relationships with the Ghosts. Perhaps I—’

  ‘I don’t care what you do, or did. None of that matters now, your old life. You’ve died and been reborn. Now you’re just another Sample, like us. You don’t even have a number, as I do, since you weren’t processed by the Ghosts before you were liberated.’

  ‘Samples. Numbers.’ Donn saw it now. ‘This, wherever I am, is where you go when you’re abducted.’

  ‘You’ve got it,’ Hama Belk said. ‘Just as the snatching is random, so is the depositing. Usually you end up in a processing chamber, surrounded by a thousand Ghosts. That’s what happened to me before the rats busted me out. Others end up on the surface, exposed – evidently the transfer isn’t a hundred per cent reliable. There are places where the strays end up, and we wait for them, with blankets; that’s how Five found you.’

  ‘How does it work, this transfer, the snatching?’

  ‘Well, we don’t know,’ Hama said. ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘And those exposed on the surface—’

  ‘They die, if they aren’t found in a heartbeat by Ghost patrols, or by us rats.’

  ‘Rats?’

  ‘Us,’ said Five. ‘Wild humans, living in the cracks. Though I personally have never seen a rat, I understand the concept.’

  ‘How come you haven’t seen a rat? Never mind. Have you heard of Benj Wyman? My brother. He was abducted only hours before me—’

  ‘No,’ Five said bluntly.

  ‘Look,’ Donn said, ‘you can see there’s been some kind of mix-up. I’m not an abductee, a Sample as you call them. I came here with a Silverman. You saw it. You cut its arm off! Maybe if you hadn’t chased it off – if I could talk to it—’

  Five laughed in his face. ‘Every virgin Sample says the same thing. “I’m not supposed to be here. I’m special, I’m a mother or a father, I have this-or-that back home.”’

  ‘How do I get back?’

  She just laughed at him again. She walked away, and knelt down by the nursing mother.

  All at once, the hardness of her manner, the shock of all his experiences that day, hit Donn. He staggered, and stumbled back against the wall.

  Hama grabbed his arm. ‘Here. Sit down. Look, there’s a ledge.’ He handed Donn a silver bowl. ‘Try to eat some of this. It’ll warm you up.’

  ‘It’s just so sudden.’ He looked at Hama. ‘I hadn’t even taken in my own brother’s abduction. And now—’

  ‘Well, you’ve plenty of time to get used to it. Take the bowl.’ It contained a brownish sludge, like a thick soup.

  Donn dipped a cautious finger in the bowl and tasted the gloop. It was lukewarm and tasted faintly of mushrooms. ‘More Ghost technology?’

  ‘Yes. We just scrape up the green shit from our footsteps outside and drop it in. This is how they feed the Samples. Here, your ears are bleeding.’ He handed Donn a scrap of cloth.

  Donn dabbed at his ears; the cloth came away bloody. ‘I don’t even know where I am.’

  Hama shrugged. ‘None of us do. We’re obviously still in the Association. And this is obviously a rogue planet, far from any sun. But aside from that we can’t tell. After all, as Five said, nobody’s ever been back to tell the tale. We just call it “Ghostworld”.’

  Donn nodded. ‘It seems like a typical Ghost colony world, from what I know of them.’

  ‘Yes. We were taught all about Ghosts in our training, on the way here in the Spline ships . . .’

  The Ghosts’ world was once Earth-like: blue skies, a yellow sun. But as the Ghosts climbed to awareness their sun evaporated, killed by a companion pulsar. The oceans froze and life huddled inward; there was frantic evolutionary pressure to find ways to keep warm. And the only way to do that was through cooperation.

  ‘That’s the story,’ Hama said. ‘Though many of us in the Commission wonder if this is true, or just some kind of creation myth. Or propaganda. Certainly the thing we call a Silver Ghost really is 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 is independently alive.’

  ‘Even when you take it from the Ghost, it lives on.’

  ‘I wouldn’t be judgemental,’ Hama said evenly. ‘I myself was a clerk in the Commission for Historical Truth, working on the re-education of the Reef population. I come from Mercury, actually, a sister planet of Earth. I hadn’t been on the Reef long before the lottery of the Sampling picked me. But none of that matters now.’ He looked at his hands. ‘All I have here is myself, and those around me. And I do what I must, to stay alive.’

  ‘Why do they bring us here? Why the Samples?’

  Hama eyed him. ‘You said you worked with Ghosts. You don’t know? I think it’s because they are trying to understand us, the Ghosts. They fear us, for right now our Third Expansion is overwhelming them. But you can’t defeat what you don’t understand.’

  ‘So they take us for study.’ Donn shook his head. ‘But these random abductions, of a child from a mother, a father from a daughter – my own brother was taken. The Ghosts couldn’t antagonise us more if they tried.’

  ‘I guess that shows how little they understand us, yes?’

  ‘And what about Five, the girl with no name?’

  ‘Ah. She was taken as an infant, under two years old I think. As she grew she was surrounded only by Ghosts. The only human she saw was her own reflection in the hide of a Ghost. She grew up thinking she was some kind of deformity, a mutant, disabled Ghost.

  ‘Eventually a rat pack broke into her cage. She thought they were as diseased as she was. I think she was raped. She was only thirteen, fourteen. What a welcome to humanity! Somehow she came through that, and emerged as a functioning human being – I say functioning – all she knows is this, life as a rat, and all she wants to do is kill Ghosts.’ He smiled. ‘She’s inventive about it, though.’

  Donn watched Five with the mother. ‘I’ll be wary.’

  ‘Yes, do. Don’t get any foolish ideas of saving her. And there are worse. Rat packs that prey on humans, other Samples. Even at the moment of abduction.’

  Donn looked at him curiously. ‘And what do you want, Hama?’

  ‘I came to the Association to save you, Donn. I mean, all of you on the Reef, living in non-Doctrinal ignorance out here in the dark. If all I can do is live here as if in a guerrilla cell behind the lines, killing a few Ghosts before my short life is over – well, maybe that’s enough. It is my duty to die. A brief life burns brightly. That is the slogan of the Third Expansion of mankind.’

  Donn said carefully, ‘I think I’m more afraid of you than the feral girl over there.’

  Hama laughed.

  Five came to stand over Hama and Donn. Naked, lithe, her body was a pale streak in the silvery light, her nipples hard, her pubic hair a blonde tuft. ‘Rested, are you? We’re mounting a raid. You’re lucky, Donn Wyman. We’ve been planning this one for a while; you’ll be there for the pay-off.’

  Donn made to protest. ‘I only just got here. I need to find my brother – the Silverman—’

  But she was already walking away.

  Hama nudged him. ‘That wasn’t a request. Come on, on your feet.’

  Donn struggled up, his chest still aching from his fall.

  A par
ty of a dozen adults suited up.

  They clambered up through the airtight membrane into the spectral stillness of the landscape. Donn was shocked that the Boss had shifted in the sky, moving away from the zenith, and the shadows it cast were long. Donn had never before seen a sunset, or a dawn; this was a planet, not an artifice like the Reef.

  They checked each other’s suits, and were handed weapons. Donn was astonished to be given a spear. Then, following Five’s lead, they set off over the ice.

  The weapons were mostly crude – spinning blades mounted on poles, or even more primitive than that, daggers and swords, pikes and spears, lengths of barbed wire and ugly tangles of spikes and hooks. But there were a few more sophisticated instruments – a kind of projectile weapon like a bazooka, even what looked like a Qax-era gravity-wave handgun, much repaired, polished smooth by usage.

  They carried these weapons, walking to war.

  ‘I can’t believe we’re doing this,’ Donn said, to nobody in particular. ‘We’re like pre-industrial savages.’

  ‘I know how you feel,’ said a woman walking beside him. ‘I was a food technician, back on the Reef. I’m the nearest thing to a biologist this little crew has. And a doctor. But by day I’m a spear-carrier . . .’ Brisk, purposeful, she was perhaps forty; she might once have been plump, but now the skin of her cheeks and neck sagged, as if emptied. ‘My name’s Kanda Fors, by the way.’

  ‘I am—’

  ‘We all heard who you are.’ She smiled, a dogged sort of expression. ‘We like to act indifferent. I guess that’s to do with Five’s hold over us. But wait until she’s asleep. We’ll all be at you then, finding out what you know of home, our families. We only get news from Samples. And it’s all one way.’

  With her calm Reef accent she was more like Donn’s family than anybody else he had yet met here. ‘This is real, isn’t it?’ he said slowly. ‘I think maybe I’m working through some kind of shock.’ He looked at the spear he had been given. It was clearly improvised from some ripped-off bit of equipment, not much more than a steel rod with its tip laboriously sharpened. ‘I really am stuck here, at the wrong end of a one-way funnel to this shithole in the ice.’