Xeelee Redemption

by Baxter, Stephen

  Max Ward had to be physically held back from retrieving Chinelo, by Asher and Harris.

  ‘I didn’t do anything,’ Chinelo said, as the party of seniors came bustling up. ‘Well, not much. I didn’t mean to.’

  Poole walked forward, grave, calm, and spoke to the elders. ‘This is a misunderstanding. This one is a child – shut up, Max. Could she be released? I vouch for her behaviour.’

  The elders shared glances; one nodded.

  Chinelo was released, and was left rubbing her shoulders and wrists. But her guards did not back off very far.

  ‘Tell us what happened,’ Poole commanded.

  ‘It was that tepee. The big one. They wouldn’t let us see. So I went to look inside. Wouldn’t you?’

  ‘No,’ Poole said bluntly.

  Chinelo wasn’t too frightened for a cocky grin, Jophiel saw. ‘Well, I just ducked under the door. It was dark inside. No windows, and door flaps like the tepee you went to. Before I could see what I was in there with—’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It spoke! Loud as the ship’s general alarm. I jumped out of my skin. Then I saw it. I had to get out of there; that was all I thought. So I got my knife—’

  ‘Please kill me now.’

  The voice was clipped, somewhat artificial, stilted, but resonant, clear. It carried on the cool air.

  And it spoke Standard.

  Everybody shut up.

  Asher was by the tepee, sneaking a peek, Jophiel saw. ‘Lethe. I can see it. Where Chinelo ripped the cover . . . You’d better come look, Michael.’

  Jophiel stepped forward, with the others from the Cauchy.

  As these strangers approached their violated holy of holies, at a gesture from the elder, the locals held back. But Jophiel had the impression that if this incident unfolded badly over the next few minutes, there would be a lot of arrows flying. Max was fingering a blaster at his waist.

  That big tepee had ripped open from top to bottom, far beyond Chinelo’s reach. Jophiel wondered if the covering was so old it had been ready to fall apart anyhow. Through the rent, the tepee’s interior, enclosed by a frame of sapling trunks, was easily visible. And inside—

  At first Jophiel saw only a glint of silver. A smooth curve.

  A silver sphere, fat and full, two metres wide.

  It was a Ghost.

  And it was pinned in place. A pyramid of wooden stakes had been driven through it, from above – into its skin and out again – and then thrust into the ground. Also there was a wider cubical frame around the Ghost, sturdily tied together and rooted in the ground. From this more stakes pierced the Ghost, from side to side, from top to bottom.

  It was a peculiarly precise arrangement. Like a geometrical demonstration, a frame around a sphere. But the perfection of it was marred by what looked like dried blood on the hide, near the wounds.

  The elder gestured, as if in disgust and contempt. ‘Behold. The First Slaver. Vanquished, as you can see.’

  And the Ghost said, ‘Save me, Michael Poole.’

  54

  Poole reached out a hand, as if to touch the silver hide within the wooden cage, but pulled back. ‘It’s as if it has been crucified.’

  Jophiel murmured to Max, ‘Slaver. They call themselves the People of the First Slavers. But that implies there were other slavers.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Max growled. ‘Folk from the ocean. I talked to some of their youngsters. They have bloodthirsty stories of raiders coming on ships. Every few generations, it seems to happen. Maybe originating in other colonies along the coast, or islands. We haven’t properly surveyed this place. They invade, murder and rape, and take your children. The settled folk recover, band together to drive them out, even exterminate them. But then a new generation rises, and it starts all over again.’

  ‘So they know about slavers. And their folk memory of the Ghosts—’

  ‘Is of slavers who brought their distant ancestors to this world in the first place. The First Slavers. Seems apt.’ Max grinned cruelly. ‘Except, it seems, that one of them got caught. Hey, no wonder that savage Wina took a dislike to Nicola. She must have recognised the Ghost hide. To her, Nicola was a human-shaped Ghost, walking free. She took no chances. Nor would I have. Good reaction.’

  The Ghost had fallen silent, as if waiting.

  Poole faced it. ‘I am Michael Poole. You spoke my name.’

  ‘You are feared. You are worshipped.’

  ‘Not for anything I did. Some of your kind know of me, of my actions in another timeline . . . Are you in pain?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How long have you been held like this?’

  ‘Since the first coming of the Ghosts to this structure.’

  ‘We call it the Wheel.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘Over five thousand years ago. As the crew of the Gourd count time. We used faster-than-light technology which—’

  ‘You brought them here.’

  ‘We came to colonise. That is evidently the purpose of the structure – the spin gravity, the confined worlds – there are environments suitable for Ghosts and humans and many other kinds. Even Spline, or their aquatic forebears. We came here to accept the implicit invitation of the structure. It was an experiment, to study the artefact and its purpose. To see how well we could live here, on the terraces—’

  ‘The decks. This is a cupworld. The structure is the Wheel. These are the words we have used.’

  ‘Yes. Decks. Cupworlds. I will use your words, as I learn them.’

  ‘So you brought humans too.’

  ‘Yes. We brought some of the crew of the ship called the Gourd. We preserved the rest of the crew in other places.’

  ‘We know. We found them. At Goober’s Star . . . I’ll show you a star map.’

  The Ghost said nothing to that. ‘We brought samples of the ecohab with which the vessel had been equipped. We wished to study humans. If we witnessed the evolution of a human culture without prior resources, we could learn a great deal. Later, more of us came here, in our own ships and captured Qax vessels.’

  ‘We call your craft trangleships. What happened here? What happened to you?’

  ‘We planted colonies across the artefact, the Wheel. We kept in touch using the tangleships. Sometimes we transferred personnel – humans and Ghosts – from one habitat to another. Once, humans, being transported between cupworlds on a Spline vessel, rebelled. Escaped from their cages. They managed to disable the Spline. It crashed, here, on this cupworld. Crashed and died.’

  Jophiel was aware of a fist-pumping gesture by Max Ward.

  Poole said, ‘There were survivors? Humans and Ghosts?’

  ‘There was a rescue, by tangleship. Most of the Ghosts were taken off.’

  ‘Not all.’

  ‘Not all. All but one of those left behind were killed by the rebellious humans.’

  ‘All but one. All but you.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Poole walked around the frame, the pinned Ghost. ‘They did this to ensure you could not escape.’

  ‘Yes. If I tried I would rip—’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘But to prevent my escape was not the only purpose of the framing. They thought I would die, slowly. In pain.’

  ‘You did not die.’

  ‘Ghosts are not designed to die. My damaged organs, internally, recovered. My skin heals continually over the wood of the stakes. I am not fed, but my body ingests organic matter from the stakes themselves. Which are periodically replaced. And, periodically, my skin is exposed to daylight, for energy. Thus, I have lived for five thousand years. Michael Poole, will you help me?’

  Poole seemed to consider. Then he turned and walked away.

  Jophiel stormed over. ‘What are you doing? You can’t leave this crea
ture in such torment. Shame Nicola isn’t here. She’d compare this to a circle in Hell – and we, human beings from your fleet of scatterships, Michael, put this Ghost in it.’

  ‘But the Ghosts brought that crew here in the first place.’ Poole seemed distracted.

  Max Ward joined them, with Asher, others. ‘Are you talking about the Ghost? Who cares about that Lethe-spawned monster? None of that matters, Michael. None of it. All that matters is that we get out of here while we can. Leave this world.’

  Poole frowned. ‘Why the rush?’

  Max said, ‘Because this world is poor, Michael. Because there’s nothing for us in this environment.’ He grimaced. ‘Look at this place. The whole world is a lie, in a way. It has wood and sandstone, but dig down a little way and you find nothing but hull plate. There are going to be no fossil fuels or metals. Nothing but soft rock you can’t even make decent arrowheads from. You noticed that? They just sharpen wooden shafts. These people were descended from scattership crew, remember. Our own colleagues, from just a few years back. Who set out equipped as we are, with fourth-millennium technology, with flyers and flitters and food printers. All of it lost, forgotten, after five thousand years.

  ‘If we stay here we’ll be the same, in a few generations. Living through the same cycle, over and over: slavers, and war, and a bit of peace, and then more slavers. That’s all there is here. That and counting the days, and tattooing your face.’

  Asher said, ‘These people have survived. They have built a culture. There are worse fates.’

  Max shrugged. ‘So what? This isn’t what we came for.’

  Poole was silent. He might or might not have become a good leader, Jophiel reflected, but he had become a good listener.

  ‘We should take our time,’ Poole said at length. ‘In the tepee, the elders told me a bit about the Libraries – the crater features – especially the one at the mouth of the big river, the Great River as they call it, where they deposit their own information, their counts of the days. Let’s go there. Like you said, Max, whatever there is to learn we’ll find it there. Then we’ll decide on our next steps.’ He started to walk away, out of the village, in the direction of the flyer.

  Jophiel took a step after him. ‘But we can’t leave the Ghost behind. Not like this. Michael. Michael!’

  ‘He hears you,’ Max said softly. ‘He just doesn’t want to decide yet. Listen, I think I changed my mind. About the Ghost, I mean. You want my advice? We should bring it.’

  Jophiel scowled. ‘Why?’

  ‘It would be interesting to explore ways to kill it.’ He grinned. ‘Hypothetically.’

  55

  Jophiel thought that the smartest decision Michael Poole made in the aftermath of the discovery of the Ghost was to decree two full days of rest before they took another step forward. All of them, travellers, locals – and one representative of an entirely alien species – had been through huge conceptual shocks. If Jophiel had learned one thing, in the tangled history he shared with Michael going back to the first irruption of the Xeelee into the Solar System, it was that the effects of such upheavals took time to work through the soul.

  And a couple of days’ delay also happened to fit with the villagers’ plans for their next regular expedition to the Library at the mouth of the Great River.

  In the interim, Max Ward got to work setting out a perimeter around the flyer, and establishing guard routines. Local children trailed around wide-eyed after Chinelo and other young skinsuited warriors from the Cauchy as they made their patrols. Jophiel wondered if that would work out as a subtle way of building bridges.

  Harris Kemp, meanwhile, had two patients to attend to: Nicola in the flyer, and the crucified Ghost, which he was treating in a hastily improvised lean-to outside the aircraft. ‘Because there is no way,’ Max Ward had insisted, ‘that I am going to allow a potentially hostile alien inside our one and only means of escape from this cupworld.’

  Even Jophiel, who instinctively opposed everything that came out of Max’s mouth, couldn’t argue with that.

  Harris, for one, was glad to have the Ghost on hand. ‘It’s helping me treat Nicola,’ he admitted on the first day. ‘Nicola is a kind of cartoon version of a Ghost; having an original to study is helping me figure out some of her internal scrambles. Now I can figure out what Wina’s arrow actually broke, and what just looks like it’s broken . . .’

  The Ghost itself was quiet, passive. It would respond to questions put to it by Jophiel and others, but stayed silent otherwise.

  It did seem to appreciate the effort it had taken by Poole and the rest to get the locals to release it. ‘You have saved me from torment,’ it said on the second day. ‘I am in your debt, for ever.’

  ‘That might be true,’ Jophiel said drily. ‘But you haven’t actually told us much about your people, your ships, your mission here.’

  Which was true. To the detailed questions put to it by Jophiel, Max Ward and others, its default answer was ‘I do not have that information.’ Or, ‘I was a very junior component of a very large mission.’

  ‘There must be more of you,’ Jophiel said. ‘The chances of us stumbling so quickly upon the only Ghost in this cupworld are pretty slim. Don’t you have any curiosity about others of your kind? What if they’re having as bad a time as you were? Wouldn’t you wish to help them?’

  ‘I do not have that information. Even if I did I could not help them. I can scarcely travel in camouflage, in a human world. Even if I were free.’

  ‘You’ve said nothing meaningful about your ship.’

  ‘I had specific duties concerning food provision units.’ Which, when described, sounded to Jophiel like nothing so much as artificial mock-ups of deep-sea mineral vents on Earth, black smokers around which bacteria, crabs and pale fish would gather to feed off seeping minerals – perhaps a clue to the Ghosts’ ultimate origin, Asher had suggested.

  ‘What was your ship’s mission?’

  ‘I do not have that information.’ But the Ghost rolled as it said this, its motions visible from the orbits of scuffs and scars on its once-seamless silver hide, and Jophiel had the vague, unquantifiable impression that it was glancing up at the sky.

  ‘Do you fight wars? I mean, among yourselves.’

  He expected another deflection, but to his surprise the Ghost replied, ‘Only historically.’

  ‘Historically?’

  ‘That may not be the right term. We evolved out of war-making against each other.’

  Jophiel barked a laugh. ‘As we aspire to, I suppose. So maybe we have something in common.’

  ‘All sentient beings in this universe have something in common,’ the Ghost said.

  Jophiel asked on impulse, ‘What is your name?’

  ‘Name?’

  ‘Do you have a name?’

  ‘Our identities are evident to other Ghosts. At a level below symbolic communication.’

  That sounded to Jophiel like a pompous circumlocution describing a kind of telepathy.

  The Ghost said now, ‘Besides, I am alone here. Perhaps alone on all this Wheel, despite your statistical arguments. To you I am unique. What need have I of a name?’

  Jophiel had no answer.

  56

  On the third day, a rough expedition assembled. It was going to take about a day, they were told, to reach the Library by the Great River.

  Cauchy crew members gathered diffidently around a group of villagers, who carried offerings of food: roots, fruit, dried lizards, even fish from the lesser rivers, in baskets woven of tree bark. For the Library, Jophiel supposed. And there were a few warrior types, bearing spears and bows, though the mood seemed light enough.

  As for the crew, Michael Poole and Jophiel were leading, with Harris Kemp taking a day off from the care of his two unique patients. Asher came too, in case the Library did turn out to contain useful information f
or her to decipher. Max Ward sent along Chinelo and a couple more of his cadets as guards, but stayed back himself to watch the flyer, and Jophiel couldn’t argue with that priority.

  And Wina proudly presented herself to Michael Poole. ‘I, Wina, will guide your folk,’ she announced. ‘For I wounded your warrior.’

  ‘You don’t need to be paying us back,’ Asher said. ‘You were only doing your duty, as you saw it.’

  ‘That is true. But now I have a duty to you. As long as you live among us.’

  ‘Then we accept,’ Jophiel said gently.

  So the expedition, led by Wina, set off. Not that the Cauchy crew needed a guide, geographically anyhow. They would simply walk along a well-trodden trail to the nearby stream, then follow that downstream to its confluence with the Great River, and then track that to the ocean shore. From there, it seemed, the Library would be obvious.

  But if the geographic landscape was simple, the human landscape was deeply complex. It turned out that they would have to skirt the territories of two other groups en route.

  At the first such encounter, the Cauchy folk quickly learned the rules. There were special places, indistinguishable to Jophiel, where you had to stand and wait until noticed by a scout from the local community. There would be some shouting, a few ritual challenges, a spear-waving. Then you said where you were going and how long you would be, and permission to pass was grudgingly given – or not, but Jophiel suspected that was rare. Then, with the formalities over, you sat down in the shade for the more important business of the day: gossip, nostalgia, and speculations about who was likely to be marrying whom soon.

  The Cauchy crew were the subject of polite curiosity, but as they seemed to be the property of Wina’s folk, nobody questioned them directly. Jophiel wondered, in fact, if maybe the First Slaver villagers had been so keen to make this trip just so they could show off the crew to their neighbours.

  All this with warriors, like Wina, carrying lethal weapons always close to hand. But Jophiel suspected that most clashes between groups of people here were going to be more symbolic than deadly. Displays of identity; territory-marking rituals, yes – maybe some blowing off of steam when there were disputes. A couple of champions swinging their fists. Surely the folk here were too spread out for intense conflicts to be common, with too little property to be worth fighting over. And besides, these long-established groups evidently had deep shared links of territory marking and marriage bonds, reliant on a deep and intricate knowledge of past history.