‘I need time,’ she said abruptly, and forced a smile. ‘Ironic, isn’t it? Just as I’ve been given all the time anybody could ask for.’
Spina sighed. ‘Time for what?’
‘To talk to Luru Parz.’ And she left before they could react.
‘I am nearly two hundred years old,’ said Luru Parz. ‘I was born in the era of the Occupation. I grew up knowing nothing else. And I took the gift of immortality from the Qax. I have already lived to see the liberation of mankind.’
They were in a two-person flitter. Faya had briskly piloted them into a slow orbit around Port Sol; beneath them the landscape stretched to its close-crowding horizon. Here, in this cramped cabin, they were safely alone.
Port Sol was a Kuiper object: like a huge comet nucleus, circling the sun beyond the orbit of Pluto. The little ice moon was gouged by hundreds of artificial craters. Faya could see the remnants of domes, pylons and arches, spectacular microgravity architecture. But the pylons and graceful domes were collapsed, with bits of glass and metal jutting like snapped bones. Everything was smashed up. Much of this architecture was a relic of pre-Occupation days. The Qax had never come here; during the Occupation the moon had been a refuge. It had been humans, the forces of the young Coalition, who had done all this damage in their ideological enthusiasm. Now, even after decades of reoccupation and restoration, most of the old buildings were closed, darkened, and thin frost coated their surfaces.
Luru said, ‘Do you know what I see, when I look down at this landscape? I see layers of history. The great engineer Michael Poole himself founded this place. He built a great system of wormholes, rapid-transit pathways from the worlds of the inner system. And having united Sol system, here, at the system’s outermost terminus, Poole’s disciples used great mountains of ice to fuel interstellar vessels. It was the start of mankind’s First Expansion. But then humans acquired a hyperdrive.’ She smiled wistfully. ‘Economic logic. The hyper-ships could fly right out of the crowded heart of Sol system, straight to the stars. Nobody needed Poole’s huge wormhole tunnels, or his mighty ice mine. And then the Qax came, and then the Coalition.’
‘But now Port Sol has revived.’
‘Yes. Because now we are building a new generation of starships, great living ships thirsty for Port Sol’s water. Layers of history.’
‘Luru, why should I be tainted in this way? Why my family?’
‘It’s common on Port Sol,’ Luru said. ‘Relatively. Even during the Occupation, and again under the Coalition’s persecution, the undying fled to the outer system - to the gas giants’ moons, to here, a forgotten backwater. Yes, this was a hideout for undying.’
‘I know. That’s why the Coalition were so brutal.’
‘Yes. Many undying escaped the Coalition invasion, and fled further. A flock of generation starships rose from the ice of Port Sol, even as the Coalition ships approached, commanded by undying; nobody knows what became of them. But while they were here, you see, the undying perturbed the gene pool, with their own taint of longevity. It’s not a surprise that throwbacks like you, as the Commission calls you, should arise here.’
‘Luru Parz, I don’t know what to do. Will I have to hide?’
‘Yes. But you mustn’t be ashamed. There is an evolutionary logic to our longevity.’ Luru clutched a fist over her heart. ‘Listen to me. Before we were human, when we were animals, we died after the end of our fertile years, like animals. But then, as we evolved, we changed. We lived on, long after fertility ended. Do you know why? So that grandmothers could help their daughters raise the next generation. And that is how we overcame the other animals, and came to own the Earth - through longevity. Immortality is good for the species, even if the species doesn’t know it. You must hide, Faya. But you must not be ashamed of what you are.’
‘I don’t want to hide.’
‘You don’t have a choice. The Coalition are planning a new future for mankind, an expansion to the stars that will sweep on, for ever. There will be no place for the old. But of course that’s just the latest rationalisation. People have always burned witches.’
Faya didn’t know what a witch was.
And then a Virtual of Faya’s mother’s face congealed in the air before her, the bearer of bad news about Lieta.
Faya and Spina held each other, sitting side by side. For now they were done with weeping, and they had readmitted Ank Sool, the Commissary.
‘I don’t understand,’ Faya said. It was the brevity that was impossible to bear - a handful of Dances, a flash of beauty and joy, and then dust. And why should her sister die so suddenly now, why was her life cut short, just as the prospect of eternity opened up for Faya? ‘Why Lieta? Why now?’
Sool said, ‘Blame the Qax. The pharaohs never bred true. Many of their offspring died young, or their development stopped at an unsuitable age, so that immortality remained in the gift of the occupiers. The Qax were always in control, you see.’
Faya said carefully, ‘Commissary, I think I will always suspect, in a corner of my heart, that you allowed this death to happen, in order to bring me under control.’
His eyes were blank. ‘The Commission for Historical Truth has no need of such devices.’
Spina grasped her daughter’s hands. ‘Take the mortality treatment, dear. It’s painless. Get it over, and you will be safe.’
‘You could have sent me to the Commission as a child. I could have been cured then. I need never have even known.’
Sool said dryly, ‘So you would blame your mother rather than the Qax. How - human.’
Spina’s face crumpled. ‘Oh, love, how could I take such a gift away from you - even to protect you?’
‘It’s your decision,’ said Sool.
‘It always had to be,’ said her mother.
Again she swept into orbit with Luru Parz, seeking privacy.
This is how it will be for me from now on, she thought: hiding from people. I will be one of a handful of immortal companions, like crabbed, folded-over Luru here, standing like unchanging rocks in a landscape of evanescent flowers.
That or mortality.
‘I can’t stand the thought of seeing them all growing old and dying around me. For ever.’
Luru nodded. ‘I know. But you aren’t thinking big enough, child. On a long enough timescale, everything is as transient as one of your Halo Dances. Why, perhaps we will even live to see the stars themselves sputter to life, fade and die.’ She smiled. ‘Stars are like people. Even stars come and go, you see. They die all in a blaze, or fade like the last light of the sun - but you’ve never seen a sunset, have you? The glory is always brief - but it is worth having, even so. And you will remember the glory, and make it live on. It’s your purpose, Faya.’
‘My burden,’ she said bleakly.
‘We have great projects, long ambitions, beyond the imagination of these others. Come with me.’
Tentatively Faya reached out her hand, Luru took it. Her flesh was cold.
‘I will have to say farewell—’
‘Not farewell. Goodbye. Get used to it.’
Before they left she visited the amphitheatre, one last time. And - though she knew she could never let anybody watch her, ever again - she Danced and Danced, as the waiting stars blazed.
Even as the Coalition hardened its grip on mankind, and continued its hideous cleansing of Sol system, it launched a new thrust to the stars.
The Third Expansion of mankind was the most vigorous yet and, driven by the new ideology of Hama Druz, the most purposeful.
I and those like me tried to stay out of the way of the engines of history.
As the Expansion unfolded humanity once more encountered alien kinds, and re-engaged in wider Galactic history. It was only a little more than eighty years after the liberation from the Qax that a first contact of devastating significance was made.
PART TWO
THE WAR WITH THE GHOSTS
SILVER GHOST
AD 5499
Minda didn’t even see the volcanic p
lume before it swallowed up her flitter.
Suddenly the fragile little craft was turning end over end, alarms wailing and flashing, all its sensors disabled. But to Minda, feeling nothing thanks to her cabin’s inertial suspension, it was just a light show, a Virtual game, nothing to do with her.
Just seconds after entering the ash plume, the flitter rammed itself upside down into an unfeasibly hard ground. Crumpling metal screamed. Then the inertial suspension failed. Minda tumbled out of her seat, and her head slammed into the cabin roof.
Immersed in sudden silence, sprawled on the inverted ceiling, she found herself staring out of a window. Gushing vapour obscured the landscape. That was air, she thought woozily. The frozen air of this world, of Snowball, blasted to vapour by the flitter’s residual heat.
All she could think of was what her cadre leader would have to say. You fouled up, Bryn would tell her. You don’t deserve to survive. And the species will be stronger for your deletion.
I’m fifteen years old. I’m strong. I’m not dead yet. I’ll show her.
She passed out.
Maybe she awoke, briefly. She thought she heard a voice.
‘. . . You are a homeotherm. That is, your body tries to maintain a constant temperature. It is a common heat management strategy. You have an inner hot core, which appears to comprise your digestive organs and your nervous system, and an outer cooler shell, of skin and fat and muscle and limbs. The outer shell serves as a buffer between the outside world and the core. Understanding this basic mechanism should help you survive . . .’
Through the window, between gusts of billowing mist, she glimpsed something moving: a smooth curve sliding easily past the wreck, a distorted image of a crumpled metallic mass. It couldn’t be real, of course. Nothing moved on this cold world.
When she woke up properly, it was going to hurt. She closed her eyes.
When she couldn’t stay unconscious any longer, she was relieved to find she could move.
She climbed gingerly out of the crumpled ceiling panel. She probed at her limbs and back. She seemed to have suffered nothing worse than bruises, stiffness and pulled muscles.
But she was already feeling cold. And she had a deepening headache that seemed to go beyond the clatter she had suffered during the landing.
Her cabin had been reduced to a ball, barely large enough for her to stand up. The only light was a dim red emergency glow. She quickly determined she had no comms, not so much as a radio beacon to reveal her position - and there was only a trickle of power. Most of the craft’s systems seemed to be down - everything important, anyhow. There was no heat, no air renewal; maybe she was lucky the gathering cold had woken her before the growing foulness of the air put her to sleep permanently.
But she was stuck here. She sat on the floor, tucking her knees to her chest.
It all seemed a very heavy punishment for what was, after all, a pretty minor breach of discipline.
OK, Minda shouldn’t have taken a flitter for a sightseeing jaunt around the glimmering curve of the new world. OK, she shouldn’t have gone solo, and should have lodged and stuck to a flight plan. OK, she shouldn’t have flown so low over the ruined city.
But the fact was that after grousing her way through the three long years of the migration flight from Earth - three years, a fifth of her whole life - she’d fallen in love with this strange, lonely, frozen planet as soon as it had come swimming toward her through sunless space. She had sat glued before Virtual representations of her new home, tracing ocean beds with their frozen lids of ice, continents coated by sparkling frost - and the faint, all-but-erased hints of cities and roads, the mark of the vanished former inhabitants of this unlucky place. The rest of her cadre were more interested in Virtual visions of the future, when new artificial suns would be thrown into orbit around this desolate pebble. But it was Snowball itself that entranced Minda - Snowball as it was, here and now, a world deep-frozen for a million years.
As the Spline fleet had lumbered into orbit - as she had endured the ceremonies marking the claiming of this planet on behalf of the human species and the Coalition - she had itched to walk on shining lands embedded in a stillness she had never known in Earth’s crowded Conurbations.
Which was why, just a week after the first human landing on Snowball, she had gotten herself into such a mess.
Well, she couldn’t stay here. Reluctantly she got to her feet.
With a yank on a pull-tag, her seat cushion opened up into a survival suit. It was thick and quilted, with an independent air supply and a sewn-in grid of heating elements and lightweight power cells. She sealed herself in. Clean air washed over her face, and the suit’s limited medical facilities probed at her torn muscles.
She had to trigger explosive bolts to get the hatch open. The last of the flitter’s air gushed out into a landscape of silver and black, and crystals of frost fell in neat parabolas to an icebound ground. Though she was cocooned in her suit, she felt a deeper chill descend on her.
And as the vapour froze out, again she glimpsed strange sudden movement - a surface like a bubble, or a distorting mirror - an image of herself, a silvery figure standing framed in a doorway, ruddy light silhouetting her. The image shrank away.
It had been like seeing a ghost. This world of death might be full of ghosts. I should be scared, she thought. But I’m walking away from a volcanic eruption and a flitter crash. One thing at a time, Minda. Clumsily she clambered through the crash-distorted hatchway.
She found herself standing in a drift of loose, feathery snow that came up to her knees. Beneath the snow was a harder surface: perhaps water ice, even bare rock. Where her suit touched the snow, vapour billowed around her.
To her left that volcano loomed above the horizon, belching foul black fast-moving plumes that obscured the stars. And to her right, in a shallow valley, she made out structures - low, broken walls, perhaps a gridwork of streets. Everything was crystal clear: no mist to spoil the view on this world, where every molecule of atmosphere lay as frost on the ground. The sky was black and without a sun - yet it was far more crowded than the sky of Earth, for here, at the edge of the great interstellar void known as the Local Bubble, the hot young stars of Scorpio were close and dazzling.
The landscape was wonderful, what she had borrowed the flitter to come see. And yet it was lethal: every wisp of gas around her feet was a monument to more lost heat. Her fingers and toes were already numb, painful when she flexed them.
She walked around the crash site. The flitter had dug itself a trench. And as it crashed the flitter had let itself implode, giving up its structural integrity to protect the life bubble at its heart - to protect her. The craft had finished up as a rough, crumpled sphere. Now it had nothing left to give her.
Her suit would expire after no more than a few hours. She had no way to tell Bryn where she was - they probably hadn’t even missed her yet. And she and her flitter made no more than a metallic pinprick in the hide of a world as large as Earth.
She was, she thought wonderingly, going to die here. She spoke it out loud, trying to make it real. ‘I’m going to die.’ But she was Minda. How could she die? Would history go on after her? Would mankind sweep on, outward from the Earth, an irresistible colonising wave that would crest far beyond this lonely outpost, with her name no more than a minor footnote, the first human to die on the new world? ‘I haven’t done anything yet. I haven’t even had sex properly—’
A vast, silvered epidermis ballooned before her, and a voice spoke neutrally in her ear.
‘Nor, as it happens, have I.’
It was the silver ghost.
She screamed and fell back in the snow.
A bauble, silvered, perhaps two metres across, hovered a metre above the ground, like a huge droplet of mercury. It was so perfectly reflective that it was as if she couldn’t see it at all: only a fish-eye reflection of the flitter wreck and her own sprawled self, as if a piece of the world had been cut out and folded over.
And
this silvery, ghostly, not-really-there creature was talking to her.
‘Native life forms are emerging from dormancy,’ said a flat, machine-generated voice in her earpieces. ‘Your heat is feeding them. To them you are a brief, unlikely summer. How fascinating.’
Clumsy in her thick protective suit, bombarded by shocks and strangeness, she twisted her head to see.
The snow was melting all around her, gushing up in thin clouds of vapour that quickly refroze and fell back, so that she was lying in the centre of a spreading crater dug out of the soft snow. And in that crater there was movement. Colours spread over the ice, all around her: green and purple and even red, patches of it like lichen, widening as she watched. A clutch of what looked like worms wriggled in fractured ice. She even saw a tiny flower push out of a mound of frozen air, widening a crimson mouth.
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