There was a subtle shadow before me.
I looked up, and found myself staring at my own reflection—an angled head, an open mouth, a sprawled body—folded over, fish-eye style, just centimeters from my nose.
It was a Ghost. It bobbed massively before me.
I pushed myself away from the hull, slowly. I grabbed hold of the nearest tangle branch with my good hand. I knew I couldn’t reach for my knife, which was tucked into my belt at my back. And I couldn’t see Jeru anywhere. It might be that the Ghosts had taken her already. Either way I couldn’t call her, or even look for her, for fear of giving her away.
The Ghost had a heavy-looking belt wrapped around its equator. I had to assume that those complex knots of equipment were weapons. Aside from its belt, the Ghost was quite featureless: it might have been stationary, or spinning at a hundred revolutions a minute. I stared at its hide, trying to understand that there was a layer in there like a separate universe, where the laws of physics had been tweaked. But all I could see was my own scared face looking back at me.
And then Jeru fell on the Ghost from above, limbs splayed, knives glinting in both hands. I could see she was yelling—mouth open, eyes wide—but she fell in utter silence, her comms disabled.
Flexing her body like a whip, she rammed both knives into the Ghost’s hide—if I took that belt to be its equator, somewhere near its north pole. The Ghost pulsated, complex ripples chasing across its surface. But Jeru did a handstand and reached up with her legs to the tangle above, and anchored herself there.
The Ghost began to spin, trying to throw Jeru off. But she held her grip on the tangle, and kept the knives thrust in its hide, and all the Ghost succeeded in doing was opening up twin gashes, right across its upper section. Steam pulsed out, and I glimpsed redness within.
For long seconds I just hung there, frozen.
You’re trained to mount the proper reaction to an enemy assault. But it all vaporizes when you’re faced with a ton of spinning, pulsing monster, and you’re armed with nothing but a knife. You just want to make yourself as small as possible; maybe it will all go away. But in the end you know it won’t, that something has to be done.
So I pulled out my own knife and launched myself at that north pole area.
I started to make cross-cuts between Jeru’s gashes. Ghost skin is tough, like thick rubber, but easy to cut if you have the anchorage. Soon I had loosened flaps and lids of skin, and I started pulling them away, exposing a deep redness within. Steam gushed out, sparkling to ice.
Jeru let go of her perch and joined me. We clung with our fingers and hands to the gashes we’d made, and we cut and slashed and dug; though the Ghost spun crazily, it couldn’t shake us loose. Soon we were hauling out great warm mounds of meat—ropes like entrails, pulsing slabs like a human’s liver or heart. At first ice crystals spurted all around us, but as the Ghost lost the heat it had hoarded all its life, that thin wind died, and frost began to gather on the cut and torn flesh.
At last Jeru pushed my shoulder, and we both drifted away from the Ghost. It was still spinning, but I could see that the spin was nothing but dead momentum; the Ghost had lost its heat, and its life.
Jeru and I faced each other.
I said breathlessly, “I never heard of anyone in hand-to-hand with a Ghost before.”
“Neither did I. Lethe,” she said, inspecting her hand. “I think I cracked a finger.”
It wasn’t funny. But Jeru stared at me, and I stared back, and then we both started to laugh, and our slime suits pulsed with pink and blue icons.
“He stood his ground,” I said.
“Yes. Maybe he thought we were threatening the nursery.”
“The place with the silver saucers?”
She looked at me quizzically. “Ghosts are symbiotes, tar. That looked to me like a nursery for Ghost hides. Independent entities.”
I had never thought of Ghosts having young. I had not thought of the Ghost we had killed as a mother protecting its young. I’m not a deep thinker now, and wasn’t then; but it was not, for me, a comfortable thought.
But then Jeru started to move. “Come on, tar. Back to work.” She anchored her legs in the tangle and began to grab at the still-rotating Ghost carcass, trying to slow its spin.
I anchored likewise and began to help her. The Ghost was massive, the size of a major piece of machinery, and it had built up respectable momentum; at first I couldn’t grab hold of the skin flaps that spun past my hand. As we labored I became aware I was getting uncomfortably hot. The light that seeped into the tangle from that caged sun seemed to be getting stronger by the minute.
But as we worked those uneasy thoughts soon dissipated.
At last we got the Ghost under control. Briskly Jeru stripped it of its kit belt, and we began to cram the baggy corpse as deep as we could into the surrounding tangle. It was a grisly job. As the Ghost crumpled further, more of its innards, stiffening now, came pushing out of the holes we’d given it in its hide, and I had to keep from gagging as the foul stuff came pushing out into my face.
At last it was done—as best we could manage it, anyhow.
Jeru’s faceplate was smeared with black and red. She was sweating hard, her face pink. But she was grinning, and she had a trophy, the Ghost belt around her shoulders. We began to make our way back, following the same SOP as before.
When we got back to our lying-up point, we found Academician Pael was in trouble.
Pael had curled up in a ball, his hands over his face. We pulled him open. His eyes were closed, his face blotched pink, and his faceplate dripped with condensation.
He was surrounded by gadgets stuck in the tangle—including parts from what looked like a broken-open starbreaker handgun; I recognized prisms and mirrors and diffraction gratings. Well, unless he woke up, he wouldn’t be able to tell us what he had been doing here.
Jeru glanced around. The light of the fortress’s central star had gotten a lot stronger. Our lying-up point was now bathed in light—and heat—with the surrounding tangle offering very little shelter. “Any ideas, tar?”
I felt the exhilaration of our infil drain away. “No, sir.”
Jeru’s face, bathed in sweat, showed tension. I noticed she was favoring her left hand. She’d mentioned, back at the nursery pod, that she’d cracked a finger, but had said nothing about it since—nor did she give it any time now. “All right.” She dumped the Ghost equipment belt and took a deep draft of water from her hood spigot. “Tar, you’re on stag. Try to keep Pael in the shade of your body. And if he wakes up, ask him what he’s found out.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good.”
And then she was gone, melting into the complex shadows of the tangle as if she’d been born to these conditions.
I found a place where I could keep up 360-degree vision, and offer a little of my shadow to Pael—not that I imagined it helped much.
I had nothing to do but wait.
As the Ghost ship followed its own mysterious course, the light dapples that came filtering through the tangle shifted and evolved. Clinging to the tangle, I thought I could feel vibration: a slow, deep harmonization that pulsed through the ship’s giant structure. I wondered if I was hearing the deep voices of Ghosts, calling to each other from one end of their mighty ship to another. It all served to remind me that everything in my environment, everything, was alien, and I was very far from home.
I tried to count my heartbeat, my breaths; I tried to figure out how long a second was. “A thousand and one. A thousand and two …” Keeping time is a basic human trait; time provides a basic orientation, and keeps you mentally sharp and in touch with reality. But I kept losing count.
And all my efforts failed to stop darker thoughts creeping into my head.
During a drama like the contact with the Ghost, you don’t realize what’s happening to you because your body blanks it out; on some level you know you just don’t have time to deal with it. Now I had stopped moving, the aches and pains
of the last few hours started crowding in on me. I was still sore in my head and back and, of course, my busted arm. I could feel deep bruises, maybe cuts, on my gloved hands where I had hauled at my knife, and I felt as if I had wrenched my good shoulder. One of my toes was throbbing ominously: I wondered if I had cracked another bone, here in this weird environment in which my skeleton had become as brittle as an old man’s. I was chafed at my groin and armpits and knees and ankles and elbows, my skin rubbed raw. I was used to suits; normally I’m tougher than that.
The shafts of sunlight on my back were working on me too; it felt as if I was lying underneath the elements of an oven. I had a headache, a deep sick feeling in the pit of my stomach, a ringing in my ears, and a persistent ring of blackness around my eyes. Maybe I was just exhausted, dehydrated; maybe it was more than that.
I started to think back over my operation with Jeru, and the regrets began.
Okay, I’d stood my ground when confronted by the Ghost and not betrayed Jeru’s position. But when she launched her attack I’d hesitated, for those crucial few seconds. Maybe if I’d been tougher the commissary wouldn’t find herself hauling through the tangle, alone, with a busted finger distracting her with pain signals.
Our training is comprehensive. You’re taught to expect that kind of hindsight torture, in the quiet moments, and to discount it—or, better yet, learn from it. But, effectively alone in that metallic alien forest, I wasn’t finding my training was offering much perspective.
And, worse, I started to think ahead. Always a mistake.
I couldn’t believe that the Academician and his reluctant gadgetry were going to achieve anything significant. And for all the excitement of our infil, we hadn’t found anything resembling a bridge or any vulnerable point we could attack, and all we’d come back with was a belt of field kit we didn’t even understand.
For the first time I began to consider seriously the possibility that I wasn’t going to live through this—that I was going to die when my suit gave up or the sun went pop, whichever came first, in no more than a few hours.
A brief life burns brightly. That’s what you’re taught. Longevity makes you conservative, fearful, selfish. Humans made that mistake before, and we finished up a subject race. Live fast and furiously, for you aren’t important—all that matters is what you can do for the species.
But I didn’t want to die.
If I never returned to Mercury again I wouldn’t shed a tear. But I had a life now, in the Navy. And then there were my buddies: the people I’d trained and served with, people like Halle—even Jeru. Having found fellowship for the first time in my life, I didn’t want to lose it so quickly, and fall into the darkness alone—especially if it was to be for nothing.
But maybe I wasn’t going to get a choice.
After an unmeasured time, Jeru returned. She was hauling a silvery blanket. It was Ghost hide. She started to shake it out.
I dropped down to help her. “You went back to the one we killed—”
“—and skinned him,” she said, breathless. “I just scraped off the crap with a knife. The Planck-zero layer peels away easily. And look …” she made a quick incision in the glimmering sheet with her knife. Then she put the two edges together again, ran her finger along the seam, and showed me the result. I couldn’t even see where the cut had been. “Self-sealing, self-healing,” she said. “Remember that, tar.”
“Yes, sir.”
We started to rig the punctured, splayed-out hide as a rough canopy over our LUP, blocking as much of the sunlight as possible from Pael. A few slivers of frozen flesh still clung to the hide, but mostly it was like working with a fine, light metallic foil.
In the sudden shade, Pael was starting to stir. His moans were translated to stark bioluminescent icons.
“Help him,” Jeru snapped. “Make him drink.” And while I did that she dug into the med kit on her belt and started to spray cast material around the fingers of her left hand.
“It’s the speed of light,” Pael said. He was huddled in a corner of our LUP, his legs tucked against his chest. His voice must have been feeble; the bioluminescent sigils on his suit were fragmentary and came with possible variants extrapolated by the translator software.
“Tell us,” Jeru said, relatively gently.
“The Ghosts have found a way to change lightspeed in this fortress. In fact to increase it.” He began talking again about quagma and physics constants and the rolled-up dimensions of spacetime, but Jeru waved that away irritably.
“How do you know this?”
Pael began tinkering with his prisms and gratings. “I took your advice, Commissary.” He beckoned to me. “Come see, child.”
I saw that a shaft of red light, split out and deflected by his prism, shone through a diffraction grating and cast an angular pattern of dots and lines on a scrap of smooth plastic behind.
“You see?” His eyes searched my face.
“I’m sorry, sir.”
“The wavelength of the light has changed. It has been increased. Red light should have a wavelength, oh, a fifth shorter than that indicated by this pattern.”
I was struggling to understand. I held up my hand. “Shouldn’t the green of this glove turn yellow, or blue …?”
Pael sighed. “No. Because the color you see depends, not on the wavelength of a photon, but on its energy. Conservation of energy still applies, even where the Ghosts are tinkering. So each photon carries as much energy as before—and evokes the same ‘color.’ Since a photon’s energy is proportional to its frequency, that means frequencies are left unchanged. But since lightspeed is equal to frequency multiplied by wavelength, an increase in wavelength implies—”
“An increase in lightspeed,” said Jeru.
“Yes.”
I didn’t follow much of that. I turned and looked up at the light that leaked around our Ghost-hide canopy. “So we see the same colors. The light of that star gets here a little faster. What difference does it make?”
Pael shook his head. “Child, a fundamental constant like lightspeed is embedded in the deep structure of our universe. Lightspeed is part of the ratio known as the fine structure constant.” He started babbling about the charge on the electron, but Jeru cut him off.
She said, “Case, the fine structure constant is a measure of the strength of an electric or magnetic force.”
I could follow that much. “And if you increase lightspeed—”
“You reduce the strength of the force.” Pael raised himself. “Consider this. Human bodies are held together by molecular binding energy—electromagnetic forces. Here, electrons are more loosely bound to atoms; the atoms in a molecule are more loosely bound to each other.” He rapped on the cast on my arm. “And so your bones are more brittle, your skin more easy to pierce or chafe. Do you see? You too are embedded in spacetime, my young friend. You too are affected by the Ghosts’ tinkering. And because lightspeed in this infernal pocket continues to increase—as far as I can tell from these poor experiments—you are becoming more fragile every second.”
It was a strange, eerie thought: that something so basic in my universe could be manipulated. I put my arms around my chest and shuddered.
“Other effects,” Pael went on bleakly. “The density of matter is dropping. Perhaps our structure will eventually begin to crumble. And dissociation temperatures are reduced.”
Jeru snapped, “What does that mean?”
“Melting and boiling points are reduced. No wonder we are overheating. It is intriguing that bio systems have proven rather more robust than electromechanical ones. But if we don’t get out of here soon, our blood will start to boil … .”
“Enough,” Jeru said. “What of the star?”
“A star is a mass of gas with a tendency to collapse under its own gravity. But heat, supplied by fusion reactions in the core, creates gas and radiation pressures that push outward, counteracting gravity.”
“And if the fine structure constant changes—”
“The novae,” I said.
“Yes. The explosions, layers of the star blasted into space, are a symptom of destabilized stars seeking a new balance. The rate at which our star is approaching that catastrophic moment fits with the lightspeed drift I have observed.” He smiled and closed his eyes. “A single cause predicating so many effects. It is all rather pleasing, in an aesthetic way.”
Jeru said, “At least we know how the ship was destroyed. Every control system is mediated by finely tuned electromagnetic effects. Everything must have gone crazy at once … .”
We figured it out. The Brief Life Burns Brightly had been a classic GUTship, of a design that hasn’t changed in its essentials for thousands of years. The lifedome, a tough translucent bubble, contained the crew of twenty. The ’dome was connected by a spine a klick long to a GUTdrive engine pod.
When we crossed the cordon boundary—when all the bridge lights failed—the control systems went down, and all the pod’s superforce energy must have tried to escape at once. The spine of the ship had thrust itself up into the lifedome, like a nail rammed into a skull.
Pael said dreamily, “If lightspeed were a tad faster, throughout the universe, then hydrogen could not fuse to helium. There would only be hydrogen: no fusion to power stars, no chemistry. Conversely if lightspeed were a little lower, hydrogen would fuse too easily, and there would be no hydrogen, nothing to make stars—or water. You see how critical it all is? No doubt the Ghosts’ science of fine-tuning is advancing considerably here on the Orion Line, even as it serves its trivial defensive purpose …”
Jeru glared at him, her contempt obvious. “We must take this piece of intelligence back to the Commission. If the Ghosts can survive and function in these fastlight bubbles of theirs, so can we. We may be at the pivot of history, gentlemen.”
The Hard SF Renaissance Page 24