Resplendent

by Stephen Baxter

  There was something wrong with the silver ghost, she saw, through sparkling frost crystals.

  The ghost had come apart. Its silvery hide had unpeeled and removed itself like a semi-sentient overcoat. The hide fell gracelessly to the frozen ground and slithered towards her.

  She shrank back, repelled.

  What was left of the ghost was a mass of what looked like organs and digestive tracts, crimson and purple, pulsing and writhing, already shrivelling back, darkening. And they revealed something at the centre: almost like a human body, she thought, slick with pale pink fluid, and curled over like a foetus. But it, too, was rapidly freezing.

  All around the subsiding sub-organisms, the frozen air of Snowball briefly evaporated, evoking billowing mist. And the dormant creatures of the Snowball enjoyed explosive growth: not just lichen-like scrapings and isolated flowers now, but a kind of miniature forest, trees pushing out of the ice and frosted air, straining for a black sky. Minda saw roots tangle as they dug into crevices in the ice, seeking the warmth of deeper levels, perhaps even liquid water.

  But in no more than a few seconds it was over. The heat the ghost had hoarded for an unknown lifetime was lost to the uncaring stars, and the small native forest was freezing in place for another millennium of dormancy. Then the air frosted out once more.

  At last Minda fell.

  But there was something beneath her now, a smooth, dark sheet that would keep her from the ice. She collapsed onto it helplessly. A thick, stiff blanket stretched over her, shutting out the starry sky.

  She wasn’t warm, but she wasn’t getting any colder. She smiled and closed her eyes.

  When she opened her eyes again, the stars framed a Spline ship, rolling overhead, and the concerned face of her cadre leader, Bryn.

  The Spline rose high, and the site of Minda’s crash dwindled to a pinpoint, a detail lost between the tracery of the abandoned city and the volcano’s huge bulk.

  ‘It was the motion of the vegetation that our sensors spotted,’ Bryn said. Her face was sombre, her voice tired after the long search. ‘That was what drew us to you. Not your heat, or even your ghost’s. That was masked by the volcano.’

  ‘Perhaps the ghost meant that to happen,’ Minda said.

  ‘Perhaps.’ Bryn glanced at the ghost’s hide, spread on a wall. ‘Your ghost was astonishing. But its morphology is a logical outcome of an evolutionary drive. As the sky turned cold, living things learned to cooperate, in ever greater assemblages, sharing heat and resources. The thing you called a silver ghost was really 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 was independently alive . . . This is a new species for us. Evidently we have reached a point where two growing spheres of colonisation, human and ghost, have met. Our future encounters will be interesting.’

  As the planet folded on itself, Minda saw the colony of the ghosts rising over the chill horizon. It was a forest of globes and half-globes anchored by cables; gleaming necklaces swooped between the globes. The colony, a sculpture of silver droplets glistening on a black velvet landscape, was quite remarkably beautiful.

  But now a dazzling point of light rose above the horizon, banishing the stars. It was a new sun for Snowball made by humans, the first of many fusion satellites hastily prepared and launched. The ghost city cast dazzling reflections, and the silver globes seemed to shrivel back.

  Bryn said, watching her, ‘Do you understand what has happened here? If the ghosts’ evolution was not competitive as ours was, they must be weaker than us.’

  ‘But the ghost gave me its skin. It gave its life to save me.’

  Bryn said sternly, ‘It is dead. You are alive. Therefore you are the stronger.’

  ‘Yes,’ Minda whispered. ‘I am the stronger.’

  Bryn eyed her with suspicion.

  Where the artificial sun passed, the air melted, pooling and vaporising in great gushes.

  After that first contact, two powerful interstellar cultures cautiously engaged. One man, called Jack Raoul, played a key role in developing a constructive relationship.

  To understand the creatures humans came to know as ‘Silver Ghosts’ - so Raoul used to lecture those who were sceptical about the mission that consumed his life - you had to understand where they came from.

  After the Ghosts watched their life heat leak away to the sky, they became motivated by a desire to understand the fine-tuning of the universe. As if they wanted to fix the design flaws that had betrayed them.

  So they meddled with the laws of physics. This made them interesting to deal with. Interesting and scary.

  Relationships deepened. The ‘Raoul Accords’ were established to maintain the peace, and give humans some say in the Ghosts’ outrageous tinkering with the universe.

  But times changed. The Coalition tightened its grip on human affairs.

  Three centuries after Minda, there was rising friction between Ghost and human empires. And Jack Raoul found himself out of favour.

  THE COLD SINK

  AD 5802

  ‘I called on Jack Raoul at the time appointed, acting in my capacity as a representative of the Supreme Court of the Third Expansion. Raoul submitted himself to my custody without complaint or protest.

  ‘I must record that the indignity of the armed escort, as ordered by the court, only added to the cruelty of the procedure I was mandated to perform.’

  It was as if somebody had called his name.

  He was alone in his Virtual apartment - drinking whisky, looking out at a fake view of the New Bronx, missing his ex-wife - alone in a home become a gaol, in fact. Now he looked to the door.

  Maybe they’d come to get him already. He felt his remote heart beat, and his mood of gloomy nostalgia gave way to hard fear. Don’t let ’em see they’ve won, Jack.

  With a growl, he commanded the door to open.

  And there, instead of the surgeons and Commission goons he had expected, was a Silver Ghost: a spinning, shimmering bauble as tall as Raoul, crowding the dowdy apartment-block corridor. It was intimidating close to in this domestic environment, like some huge piece of machinery. In its mirrored epidermis he could see his own gaunt Virtual face. An electromagnetic signature was quickly overlaid for him - Ghosts looked alike only in normal human vision - but he would have recognised his visitor anyhow.

  ‘You,’ he said.

  ‘Hello, Jack Raoul.’ It was the Ghost known to humans as the Ambassador to the Heat Sink. Raoul had dealt with this one many times before, over decades.

  ‘What are you doing here? How did you get past the Commission security? . . . Ambassador, I’m afraid I’m not much use to you any more.’

  ‘Jack Raoul, I am here for you.’

  Raoul grimaced. What in Lethe did that mean? ‘Look, I don’t know how closely you’ve been following human politics. This isn’t a good day for me.’

  ‘As in former times, you hide your emotions behind weak jokes.’

  ‘They’re the best jokes I’ve got,’ he said defensively.

  ‘The truth is well known. Today you must face the sentence of your conspecifics.’

  ‘So you’re here for the spectacle?’

  The Ghost said, ‘I am here to present another option, Jack Raoul.’

  Raoul studied the Ghost’s bland, shimmering surface. There was no hope for him, of course. But he felt oddly touched. ‘You’d better come in.’

  The Ambassador sailed easily into the apartment, making the walls crumble to pixels where its limbs brushed against them. ‘How is the whisky today?’

  Raoul sipped it, savouring its peaty smoke. ‘You know, I’m more than two hundred years old. But I figure that I could live another two hundred and not get this stuff right.’ Still, maybe this would be his lasting legacy, he thought sourly: the best Virtual whisky in all the Third Expansion, savoured and remembered long after the Raoul Accords had been forgotten - which time might not be so far into the fut
ure.

  ‘You are missing Eve,’ said the Ambassador.

  The Ghost’s perception had always surprised him. ‘Yeah,’ he admitted. ‘In a way this place is all I have left of her. But even here she is just an absence.’

  ‘You must leave her now,’ said the Ghost. ‘Come with me.’

  The abruptness of that startled him. ‘Leave? How? Where are we going?’

  ‘Jack Raoul, do you trust me?’

  Escape was impossible, of course; Coalition security was tight, the Commission omnipresent. But this lunatic Ghost must have come a long way for this stunt, whatever it was. Maybe it was only respectful to go along for the ride.

  Anyhow, what did he have to lose? One last adventure, Jack: why not?

  He put the whisky glass down on a low table, savouring the weight of the heavy crystal, the gentle clink of its base on the table. ‘Yes,’ he said, looking into his heart. ‘Yes, I guess I do trust you.’ He stood straight. ‘I’m ready.’

  Again he had the sensation that somebody was calling his name.

  The room crumbled into blocky pixels that washed away like spindrift, and suddenly he was suspended in light.

  ‘It is important to understand that Raoul’s fully human brain was maintained by normal physiological functions. Think of him as a human being, then, flensed and de-boned, sustained within a shell of alien artifice.

  ‘The operation was more like a dismantling than a medical procedure. It was rapid.

  ‘Immediately after the beheading I lifted the head and observed Raoul’s eyes.

  ‘The lids worked in irregularly rhythmic contractions for about five or six seconds. Then the spasmodic movements ceased. The face relaxed, the lids half-closed on the eyeballs, leaving only the white of the conjunctiva visible. (It will be recalled that Raoul’s “eyes” were quasi-organic Ghost artefacts.)

  ‘I called in a sharp voice: “Jack Raoul!” I saw the eyelids lift up, without any spasmodic contractions.

  ‘Raoul’s eyes fixed themselves on mine.’

  Raoul looked down at himself. His body gleamed, a silver statue.

  He peered around, trying to get oriented. He made out a tangle of silvery rope, a complex, multi-layered webbing that appeared to stretch around him in all directions. Everywhere he looked, Ghosts slid along the cables like droplets of mercury. And beyond and through it all, a deep glimmering light shone, a universal glow made pearl grey by the depth of the tangle.

  He sure wasn’t on 51 Pegasi I-C any more.

  Jack Raoul had spent his working life at the uneasy political interface between Ghost and human. In those vanishing days of more-or-less friendly rivalry, governed by more-or-less equable accords, it had been Raoul’s responsibility to ensure that humans knew what the Ghosts were doing, on their vast, remote experimental sites, just as Ghost observers were allowed to inspect human establishments. Mutual security through inspection and verification, an old principle.

  But Raoul had soon learned that asking for evidence wasn’t enough. Somebody had to go out there and see for himself - and on Ghost terms. That meant a sacrifice, though, that nobody was prepared to accept.

  Nobody but Raoul himself.

  So his brain and spinal cord were rolled up and moved into a cleaned-out chest cavity. His circulatory system was wrapped into a complex mass around the brain pan. The Ghosts built a new metabolic system, far more efficient than the old and capable of working off direct radiative input. New eyes, capable of working in spectral regions well beyond the human range, were bolted into his skull. He was given Ghost ‘muscles’ - a tiny antigravity drive and compact actuator motors. At last he was wrapped in something that looked like sheets of mercury.

  Thus he was made a Ghost.

  Jack Raoul couldn’t live with people any more, outside of Virtual environments. Not that he wanted to. But he could fly in space. He could eat sunlight and survive the vacuum for days at a time, sustaining his antique human core in warmth and darkness. It was odd that he was actually more at home here in a Ghost ship than anywhere in the human Expansion.

  ‘. . . Jack Raoul.’ The Sink Ambassador swum before him, spinning languidly. ‘How do you feel?’

  Raoul flexed his metal fingers. ‘How do you think I feel?’

  ‘You are as evasive as ever.’

  ‘Am I on a ship, Ambassador?’ If so it was bigger than any Ghost cruiser he had ever seen.

  ‘In a manner of speaking. For now, we must ascend.’

  ‘Ascend?’

  ‘Towards the light. Please.’ The Ghost rose, slow waves crossing its surface.

  Effortlessly Raoul followed.

  Soon they were passing into the tangle of silvery ropes. When he looked back, there was nothing to mark the place he had emerged from - not even a hollow in the tangle.

  At home or not, he knew he shouldn’t be here.

  ‘Ambassador, I was under house arrest. How did you get me out of there?’

  ‘Have you improved your understanding of quantum physics since we last met?’

  Inwardly, Raoul groaned.

  The Ambassador began, somewhat earnestly, to describe how the Ghosts had learned to break up electrons: to divide indivisible particles.

  ‘The principle is simple,’ said the Ghost. ‘An electron’s quantum wave function describes the probability of finding it at any particular location. In its lowest energy state, the wave function is spherical. But in its next highest energy state the wave function has a dumb-bell shape. Now, if that dumb-bell could be stretched and pinched, could it be divided? . . .’

  The Ambassador described how a vat of liquid helium was bathed in laser light of a precise frequency, exciting electron wave functions into their dumb-bell configurations. Then, as the pressure within the helium was increased, the electron dumb-bells split and pairs of half-bubbles drifted apart.

  To Raoul it sounded like a typical Ghost experiment: extremes of low temperature, the fringe areas of physical law.

  ‘Jack Raoul, you must understand that the quantum wave function is no mathematical abstraction, but a physical entity. We have split and trapped a wave function itself - perhaps the first time in the history of the universe this has occurred,’ the Ghost said immodestly.

  Raoul suppressed a sigh. ‘You guys never do anything simply, do you? So you split an electron’s wave function. So what?’

  ‘The half-electrons, coming from the same source, are forever entangled. Put another way, if the bubbles are separated and the wave function collapsed, an electron can leap from one bubble to another . . .’

  Raoul fought his way through that fog of words. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Teleportation. You’re talking about a new kind of teleportation. Right? And that’s what you used to get me out of my cell.’

  ‘Yes. Time was short, Jack Raoul. Your conspecifics were closing in.’

  So they were, and so they had been for decades.

  Still they rose through the crowded tangle. That all-consuming light seemed, if anything, to be growing brighter. He could sense deep vibrations passing through the ship’s structure, the booming low-frequency calls of Silver Ghosts. Here and there he saw denser concentrations - nurseries, perhaps, or control centres, or simply areas where Ghosts lived and played - little more than patches of silvery shadow, like birds’ nests in the branches of some vast tree. It was characteristic Ghost architecture, vibrant, complex, beautiful, alive - and totally inhuman.

  It had always seemed to Jack Raoul that humans and Ghosts were different enough that everybody could get along. Their goals were utterly unlike humanity’s, after all. That had been the motivation behind the patchwork of treaties eventually known as the Raoul Accords. But times changed.

  When Raoul was a boy, the human colonisation programme was still piecemeal, driven by individual initiative. The leading edge of the Third Expansion had been too remote from the centre, Earth, to be tightly controlled. Players like Jack Raoul had freedom of movement. But gradually the Coalition - especially its executive arm the Comm
ission for Historical Truth - had infiltrated all mankind’s power centres. The ideologues of the Coalition had provided the species with a unity of purpose, belief, even language. The Third Expansion became purposeful, a powerful engine of conquest.

  But from Jack Raoul’s point of view, it was all downside. The pro-human ideology grew ferocious. Soon even longevity, like Raoul’s, was seen as a crime against the interests of the species. As the short generations had ticked by, and as the worlds of humanity filled up with fifteen-year-old soldiers, Raoul had come to feel like a monument left standing from an earlier, misunderstood era.