The Ghost Sister

by Liz Williams

  Bel had been listening with evident impatience. Before Mevennen could say anything, she turned to Shu Gho. “We know Elshonu was prepared to do anything to establish his goal. Including genetic manipulation.”

  “The first message spoke of the lack of many large mammals on Monde D'Isle. Maybe Elshonu saw an ecological niche and decided to work with it rather than use the ter-raforming sequence. But it didn't work, according to Mevennen,” Shu mused, and Mevennen listened, trying to make sense of the unfamiliar words. “And remember, we didn't see any trace of it in the … place where we were, did we?”

  “But now that we know there was a terraforming device … it might still be here, mightn't it?” Bel spoke with a curiously abstracted air. “If it did survive, it might be possible to ReForm this world—a lot sooner than Dia hopes …”

  Shu motioned her to be quiet. “We need to speak to the others about this.”

  “You may be ghosts,” Mevennen said reproachfully, “but please don't talk as though I weren't here.”

  Bel had the grace to blush. Shu gave a rueful smile. “Mevennen—will you think about what we've told you? And I know it's difficult to understand, but we're as real as you are.”

  Mevennen couldn't help laughing, though she tried to keep the bitterness out of her voice.

  “Not very real at that, Shu Gho. Without the bloodmind, you can never be really real.”

  “Mevennen, tell me more about this 'bloodmind.' I don't think I understand what you mean.”

  Mevennen tried to reply, but to her dismay, she could feel the unmistakable signs of a fit approaching: a hot heaviness, like the air before a storm. She did not want that to happen in front of the ghosts, when her weakness would be exposed. She put out a hand to steady herself.

  “Mevennen? Are you all right? Is something wrong?”

  “I think—I think you should go now,” Mevennen said.

  “We have so many things to ask you—” Bel Zhur began, but Shu broke in.

  “Which can wait for another day I think we've tired Mevennen enough, Bel. Let's go.”

  Bel Zhur rose and dusted off her long blue tunic; it seemed an oddly fastidious thing for a ghost to do.

  “Could you meet us again?” Bel asked. “Tomorrow in the orchard?”

  “Why? What will you do?” They were chancy things, ghosts. Maybe Mevennen would ask Eleres to come with her; she knew he'd humor her if she wanted.

  “Because we might be able to help you,” Bel Zhur said in a rush. “Maybe cure you.”

  Shu Gho began to say something, then stopped. Mevennen stared at Bel Zhur. The ghost stood, unsmiling. No question that it lied, but Mevennen was curious and the approaching fit tugged at the edges of her awareness, prompting her to say, “All right. But not tomorrow.” She would need a day or so to recover from the fit. “Come the day after that, in the evening before it gets dark. I'll be there.”

  4. The mission

  Back at the camp, Bel and Shu stood peering over Sylvian's shoulder as the output from the machine in the ruins, relayed via the ship, scrolled across the screen.

  “You see,” Sylvian murmured, pointing. “This doesn't really tell us anything. It's just output. It doesn't look anything like a set of core algorithms. To get those, we'll have to shut the machine down, but the relay keeps mutating all the time … it's always one step ahead of me. They must have set it up like this to avoid interference.” She sighed. “And if what your contact said is correct, Elshonu brought Re-Forming equipment with him, too, but it was never used … I'm sure this machine has something to do with that.”

  “Does it look like ReForming code?”

  Sylvian frowned. “That's hard to tell. It doesn't look like the biocode we use these days” —she grimaced, obviously remembering that “these days” on Irie St Syre now lay a century past—” and it's almost impossible to say for certain what ancient programming code it represents. But if it is ReForming code, then it clearly isn't having any effect on whatever supporting machinery still exists. This planet's still untouched.”

  Shu nodded. Wearily, she rubbed her eyes. It had been a long day, spent moving base camp closer to the river valley, but still within the reach of the ruins—which, she thought with that now-familiar twinge of excitement, surely had a name. Outreven. She was certain that Mevennen's legendary city and Elshonu Shikiriye's first settlement were one and the same. She gave a small, grim smile as she remembered the discussion they'd had on returning from the tower “ 'Outreven.'It sounds ominous,” Bel had said, with a shudder.

  “It means'Outworld'in Pasque,” Shu had answered.“As though the colony wanted to look back, not forward; to where they had come from rather than where they were going.”

  If that was right, it was not a good sign. But what about the machine in those ruins? What did that do? And what could Mevennen's “magical book” be, that put people in harmony with the world? Possible connections tugged at her mind, but she was too tired to think properly.

  Now, the biotents had been set up in the foothills of those mountains that separated the river valley from the steppe, and despite the tedium of packing up and relocating, Shu was glad they had done so. The air was fresher here, sharpened by the snows of the towering peaks above, and when she stepped out of the tent, she did so onto short blue-gray grass that was redolent with herbs. Shu wondered whether anyone ever made it over the mountains; staring down from the aircar she had realized how high and impenetrable they were. Perhaps, she thought, this was the reason why the ruins seemed so untouched. Belatedly, she realized that Bel and Sylvian were looking at her, expectantly, and that they had been talking quietly for several minutes.

  “Shu?” the biologist asked patiently. “What's your view of Bel's contact?”

  Shu sighed. “Sorry, I'm tired … I found her strange, but that's to be expected. The physical differences are striking— they don't seem quite human any more. And some of the concepts she was talking about, that she seemed to expect us to take for granted—I've no idea what those might be. What was that word that Mevennen used, just before we left?The bloodmind?What might that be? I didn't understand Mevennen's explanation. I'm sure it was some kind of metaphor.”

  Bel looked at her blankly. “I've no idea, either. I don't know what it means.”

  Much later, Shu was to look back on this innocent conversation, and to wonder whether the very mention of that ominous word had somehow conjured events into being. But for now, the word was merely an empty puzzle, and nothing more. She glanced up as Dia stepped through the door of the biotent.

  Dia seemed to Shu Gho to have grown increasingly withdrawn ever since their arrival in Outreven, watching from the sidelines, her face grave and introspected. Shu wondered if the Guardian was wrestling with some abstract spiritual problem or whether she was simply finding life here more difficult than she had thought.

  “Perhaps we should just go back,” Dia said now, wearily. “Return to the ship, put ourselves in stasis, and go back to Irie St Syre.”

  Bel looked at her in amazement. “What?”

  “I may have been in error,” Dia said, through tight lips. “I believed these people to be amenable to the self-evidences of faith. From your conversation with Mevennen, I am no longer sure that this is the case.”

  There was a short silence.

  “Dia, faith isn't necessarily self-evident,” Shu said, at last.

  “I believe that it is.”

  “Look, you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink. What did you think was going to happen—that we'd show up out of the blue with proof that these people's ancestors came from another world and they'd just say,' Oh, all right then, that explains that. Now let's all become Gaians.' Dia, you cannot have been that naäve.”

  “Of course I did not think that,” Dia said stiffly. “But Mevennen does not even seem interested in what we have to say.”

  Reining in her irritation, Shu said, “She listened to us, didn't she? And anyway, why should she believe what we have
to say? Just because her legends say that the ancestors came from another world, doesn't mean that she'll automat-ically believe us when we say that that's where we're from, too. As far as Mevennen's concerned, a bunch of people who look like ghosts show up with some strange story about something that happened here thousands of years ago.” The limits of Dia's understanding were only now beginning to impinge upon her. After all, as far as I know, her experience beyond the seminary was pretty limited … and she's certainly more than a bit of an egoist. She must have seen herself as their salvation. Spare me from such idealism …

  The hostility in Dia's voice was apparent now, as she said, “Shu Gho, I have been meaning to ask you. I know what you told me back home, when you asked to accompany this mission, but why exactly did you come here? To Monde D'Isle?”

  Bel looked from one to the other, puzzled, but Shu had been waiting for confrontation ever since the day of their landing. In a way, it was a relief that it had finally come.

  “I told you the truth, Dia. It interested me. I've been working with myths and folklore all my life, and one of my ancestors was apparently an original colonist here; I wanted to see for myself what had happened. And the talk of a curse on this lost world has intrigued me all my life, too. I've always been fascinated by this place.”

  “But to come all this way, to leave everything … to travel without the faith that sustains the rest of us—knowing that you won't ever be able to go home, that your reports may not be read for a hundred years at least … isn't that hard?”

  Shu said, “We don't know that it will take so long for the transmissions to be picked up. There was evidence that other systems close to this were colonized in the Diaspora, when the colony ships went out. Shikiriye wasn't the only one, after all—there were dozens of groups taking advantage of split travel and the new technology. You know as well as I do that as soon as people learned that they could spend a hundred years or so in cold sleep as opposed to thousands on the driftships, they were off and away. Just as well, given some of the religions that were springing up in the Core. Monde D'Isle wasn't the only new world to be settled in this part of the galaxy. It may only be a few years before my findings are read.”

  “But the likelihood is that you'll die here,” Dia said. “What led you to make such a decision?”

  “I've been a writer all my life,” Shu said. “I suppose it was a kind of arrogance, really. I'm not an anthropologist per se, but anthropology informs a great deal of what I write. I wanted to go to a place that no other writer had been to, and to describe it as honestly and as fully as I could. And there's no other way to visit new worlds than in the long term. It had to be done.”

  “Tell me,” Dia said, still suspiciously. “I don't fully understand what the principles of your work involve.”

  “Fundamentally they involve something called verstehen, which is a very old word for the empathic insertion of yourself into the viewpoint of someone from another culture. I try not to place any interpretation on the situations that I encounter, except ones that I can actually experience.” She thought, That's the theory, anyway. In reality, I do it all the time—but at least I know that.

  Dia said skeptically, “And do you think that's even possible?”

  “With these people, I don't know. I'd been expecting them to be more human and now I'm dealing with the limits of my assumptions. I'm not pretending my discipline is free from problems. The whole difficulty with this kind of empathic anthropology is relativism—what gives me the right to pronounce on someone else's culture? This was the criticism leveled at anthropology thousands of years ago, and it failed to answer it then. It's difficult enough relating to other people from one's own culture, let alone what's become almost a different species. I mean, you can observe to your heart's content, but can you really know? You only have your own perspective on it. And another problem with my discipline is that it's paradoxical.”

  “In what way?” Dia asked.

  “Quantum physics has affected all disciplines, Dia. I come out of a nonreductionist tradition in physics, applied to anthropology. I know it's heresy for me to say so, but that's what your faith is reacting against. Gaianism is based on the notion of cause and effect: that life is composed of a causal pattern which must be worked through, each event traced back to its beginning. Everything's holistic. But that is based on overt causation, which quantum mechanics disturbs. At the quantum level, causal chains are changed by perception. According to that, there's an argument that we make our own world. Every moment, every choice that we make, collapses that world down into a particular set of probabilities and you can't fail to take responsibility, whatever you do, because you can't not choose. Even if I'd just come here and watched these people, and kept out of sight, I'd still change their world in-eradicably, just by seeing them from another standpoint.”

  “I've lost you,” Dia said.

  “All right. It's like the old, old example of Schrödinger's cat. The act of observation determines whether the cat is alive or dead when you open the box. By coming here, we've opened the box and we're peering in. We've changed the reality of the colonists—well, one colonist, anyway, in the form of Mevennen—by observing them. In turn, they change us by refusing to see us as we think we are.”

  Bel Zhur frowned in concentration. “So because they think we're ghosts, they alter us. In what way?”

  “They give us innumerable choices as to what we can do, how we can interact with them. They make us constantly reexamine what we do. If they interacted with us, treated us as alien visitors, we'd be constrained to behave in a particular way. We'd be cast into one or another of a set of roles. Now, we're anchorless, because although they've given us a reference point, it doesn't give us any clues as to what we are to become in relation to them.”

  “And that's a reduction of probability?”

  “It's a reduction of our possibilities. Suppose that Meven-nen saw us as goddesses. How would that affect our behavior toward her? Suppose she saw us as enemies that threatened her way of life? Again, how would that affect the way we behaved toward her? How would it change us? As it is, we can only behave in the way that seems most appropriate to us, whatever that might be.”

  “So I'm helping Mevennen, for example, because that seems appropriate to me?” Bel asked.

  “Yes, but Mevennen is slightly different, because she seems anomalous. She says she's ill and that makes her different. But as for the rest of the colonists—well, how will your observation change them, let alone your actions? And what about your interpretation of them? How could that make them change?”

  “Do I interpret Mevennen?”

  “With respect, Bel Zhur, yes, you do. You see Mevennen as a fragile, lost spirit who needs you and whom you can somehow save as you believe you failed to save Eve. You're projecting your own needs onto her. I'm truly sorry to say this, Bel, but she isn't Eve.”

  Bel was silent, and Shu saw the beginnings of a grim satisfaction in Dia's face. I was right … she doesn't like competition. Shu sighed. “Sorry, Bel. I know that hurts. But I think you have to face up to the fact that Mevennen may be a very different person from the one you see.”

  “I know that,” Bel said, rather sulkily. “I'm not a child.”

  “And I didn't mean to be so patronizing,” Shu said, trying to be conciliatory.

  “You said that your reports would be subject to the difficulties of relativism,” Dia said. Now that Shu Gho had, effectively, backed her up, the hostility was fading from her voice. “Are you a relativist? I mean, morally?”

  “My morality comes from my work,” Shu Gho said. “I think moral absolutism's gone from the mainstream of thought. Everyone follows their own path now. If we'd been left on one single world we'd have torn one another apart. I don't know where you get your morals from these days if you don't have a creed, but I think it's from empathy. If you can feel what someone else feels, it's more difficult to do them harm.”

  “That's pretty idealistic,” Bel Zhur said,
striking back. “Suppose you just don't care?”

  “Then maybe you don't really feel. Empathy isn't something warm and cosy, it's being plunged into someone else's pain to the extent that you can't help but identify with it. I agree with a very ancient philosopher called Kierkegaard, who said that you should try and view yourself as objectively as possible and other people as subjectively as possible, rather than the other way round. Most people, even thousands of years later, still do it wrong. But if you don't have an objectively based morality, then identification with the other is the only way you can begin to go forward, if you still want to be a moral person. I know that's circular. But the trouble with morality as it was, even a few hundred years ago, is that everyone saw their own moral perspective as self-evident. No perspective is.”

  “I believe that Gaianism is self-evident,” Dia said stubbornly. “Look at Irie St Syre. Don't you think it's as close to a utopia as we're capable of achieving? Don't you think it's a perfect world?”

  At those words, Bel Zhur raised her frowning face and stared directly at Shu, as though challenging her.

  “I think it's very tidy,” Shu Gho said. “It's a world where nature has been completely tamed. We're in perfect harmony with our environment because we've made it that way. I suppose I can see why Elshonu wanted something different.”

  “Something different,” Dia murmured, gazing out across the vastness of the mountains and speaking with uncharacteristic irony, “is certainly what he got.”

  5. Mevennen

  Mevennen did not manage, after all, to meet the ghosts under the trees. In the evening on which she had agreed to see them, she went outside the tower, heading for the orchard, and the world rose up to meet her. It happened so suddenly that she had no time to break her fall, and when she woke she was lying in her bedroom and her brother was holding her hand. She looked up vaguely into his face. He was frowning with worry and there was something else in his face, something that she could not identify, like a light behind his eyes.