Exultant (29 page)

This “gravastar” was no black hole; it would blaze brightly with the energy of continual destruction. But even so, Draq said, outlining a paradox Pirius didn’t begin to understand, the temperature of the shell would only be a billionth of a degree above absolute zero.

Pirius failed to see the point of this. But he enjoyed the Virtual fireworks.

Nilis had become increasingly restless as this went on. At last the Commissary lumbered to his feet. “Yes, yes, Commissary Draq, this is all very well. But this is nothing but
theory
—and antique theory at that. No such ‘gravastar’ has ever been observed in nature.”

That was true, Draq conceded. The conditions needed to avoid a simple black-hole collapse were unlikely to occur by chance—an imploding object would need to shed a great deal of entropy to make the gravastar state possible, and nobody knew how that might occur in nature.

Nilis demanded, “Then how do you know the bones of your theory support any meat, eh? And besides, you’re describing spherically symmetric solutions of the equations. If I were to find myself inside a gravastar I would be as cut off and trapped, not to mention doomed to incineration by the shock wave, as if I were in a common black hole! So, Commissary, what
use
is any of this?”

Draq was clearly nervous, but he fixed his smile like a weapon. “But that’s why we need the Silver Ghosts, Commissary. To go beyond human theory. And to give us experimental verification. . . .”

Nilis joined Draq under his imploding Virtuals, and they launched into a complex and convoluted argument, involving asymptotically matched solutions of partial differential equations and other exotica. Pirius had a pilot’s basic grasp of mathematics, but this was far beyond him.

Mara approached him. She had her hands tucked into the sleeves of her robe. She whispered, “All this is a little rich for my blood, too. Perhaps we should take a walk.” She wouldn’t meet his eyes.

“You don’t want to be with me.”

“No, I don’t,” Mara said. “But it’s my duty to host you. And it’s your duty to understand what we’re doing here on Pluto—”

“Don’t talk to me about duty.”

“—even if that means you’re going to have to confront your feelings about the Silver Ghosts.”

“Why have I got to ‘confront my feelings?’” he snapped. “The Ghosts shouldn’t be here. That isn’t a feeling. It’s a fact.”

“What are you scared of?” she asked blandly.

“That’s a stupid question.”

She didn’t react. “It probably is. Will you come?”

He sighed. It was her, or Draq’s partial differential equations. “All right.”

Suited up, they walked out of the dome. Mara led him perhaps half a kilometer away from the domes of the Christy compound. They didn’t speak.

Once more, the sharp-grained, ultracold frost of Pluto crunched beneath Pirius’s feet, and he tried not to be spooked by the immense mass of Charon poised silently above his head.

They crossed a low ridge, perhaps the worn-down rim of another ancient crater, and approached a new structure. It was an open tangle of cables, wiring, small modules; it looked impractical to Pirius, more like a sculpture. But it seemed oddly familiar, and he dug for the memory, left over from some long-ago training session.

Mara spoke at last. “You understand that the main Ghost reservation, which you saw, is on the far side of the planet. But it was necessary to provide support facilities for the Ghosts who work with us here, at Christy. We decided to take the opportunity to recreate another bit of Ghost technology.”

Then Pirius saw it. “This is a cruiser,” he breathed. “A Ghost cruiser.” Once, millions of ships like this had patrolled the Orion Line, the Ghosts’ great cordon flung across the face of the Galaxy.

The Ghost ship was kilometers long, big enough to have dwarfed the greenship Pirius’s future self would have piloted in the Core. It had nothing like the lines of a human craft. The cruiser was a tangle of silvery rope within which bulky equipment pods were suspended, apparently at random.

And everywhere there were Silver Ghosts, sliding along the silver cables like beads of mercury.

“Of course it’s just a mock-up,” Mara said. “Basically life support. There are no drive units; it can’t fly. And no weapons! I always think it looks more like a forest than a ship. But that’s what it is, in a sense. The Ghosts are like miniature ecologies themselves, and they turned slices of their ecology into their ships. I’ve always thought that was a much more
elegant
solution than our own clunky mechanical systems.”

Pirius felt that deep anger welling again. “Millions of human lives were lost in the defeat of ships like this. And you’ve built a, a
monument
to our enemy.”

“Yes,” she said testily. “As you’ve said before. But don’t you think we need to understand what it was we killed?”

He thought he didn’t understand her at all. “Is that why
you’re
here? Were you always so curious about Ghosts?”

She hesitated, perhaps wary of giving away too much of herself. “I suppose so—yes. I’ve always been a Commissary. I started in the Office of Doctrinal Responsibility: very dry work! I was always blighted by curiosity. Not a good characteristic in the Commission for Historical Truth.” Her smile, behind her visor, was thin. “Then I found out about this facility, and a number of others, where life-forms generally supposed lost during the Assimilation have been preserved—or, as in the case of the Ghosts, revived.”

“
There are others? . . .
Never mind. How did you find out?”

She smiled again. “The control of the Commission isn’t as complete as some like to imagine. Truth finds a way. So I volunteered to come here. The powers that be were surprised, but they processed my application. Pluto is generally a punishment detail, you know. You come here to make amends, to end your career—certainly not to progress it.”

“And was it worth it?”

“Oh, yes, Ensign. It was worth it.” She led him around the periphery of the mocked-up cruiser. “I mean,
look
at this. What’s fascinating about the Ghosts to me isn’t their technological capabilities but their story: their origin, their account of themselves. You know, the Ghosts call the sky the Heat Sink—the place the heat went.” Since their world had frozen, Mara said, the Ghosts had not been shaped by competitive evolution, as humans had, but by cooperation. “They are symbiotic creatures. They derive from life-forms that huddled into cooperative collectives as their world turned cold. Every aspect of their physical design is about conserving heat, precious heat.

“And they seem to be motivated not by expansion for its own sake, as we are, but by a desire to understand the fine-tuning of the universe.
Why are we here?
You see, Ensign Pirius, there is only a narrow range of physical possibilities within which life of
any
sort is possible. We think the Ghosts were studying this question by pushing at the boundaries—by tinkering with the laws which govern us all.”

“But that made them dangerous.”

“Yes,” Mara said. “An enemy who can use the laws of physics as a weapon is formidable. But they developed their capabilities, not as some vast weapons program, but for their own species imperative. Until they ran up against humans, it had nothing to do with
us. . . .
”

Pirius sensed movement behind him. A Silver Ghost hovered massively, a few meters away, just above the ice surface.

Mara said quickly, “It’s only the Sink Ambassador. It must have followed us. It’s probably curious.”

“Curious? You talk as if it’s a child.” Pirius saw himself reflected in the Ghost’s complacent hide. “You,” he said. “You are the Sink Ambassador?”

“That is what I am called.”

“Is she right? That you Ghosts follow your own logic, that you care nothing for humans?”

“I don’t know,” the Ghost said. “I have no reliable data on the past.”

Mara said dryly, “These new Ghosts won’t believe a word we say about their history. Maybe they’re right not to.”

“We destroyed you,” Pirius said. “And we brought you back. Everything about you is in our power.”

“True. But that doesn’t alter my perception of you.”

Fists clenched, Pirius stepped up to the Ghost. Suddenly all the complex emotions he had been feeling—his inbred hatred of the Ghosts, his confusion at the reaction of Mara and the others, all that had struck him so overwhelmingly since the day his own future self had docked at Arches—welled up in him. And here was a Silver Ghost, right in front of him. He said on impulse, “Perhaps Mara is right. Perhaps I must learn about you, as you have learned about humans.”

Mara was disturbed. “What are you doing, Ensign?”

“Remove your hide. Disassemble yourself.
Show me what you are.
”

Mara laid a gloved hand on Pirius’s arm. Her eyes were bright with anger. “I knew I shouldn’t have brought you here.”

Pirius shook her off. “I command this Ghost.
I am human
.”

The Ghost was motionless, save for its usual subtle wafting, and Pirius, shaking with anger, wondered what he would do if the Ghost refused. He remembered his training on how to fight a Ghost. That hide was tough, but if you used all your strength you could get your knife into it, and then you could use the Ghost’s own rotation against it and open it up. . . .

The Ghost’s hide puckered, and shallow seams formed, stretching from one pole of the glistening sphere to another, segmenting the surface. The Ghost quivered briefly—then one seam split open. A sheet of crimson fluid gushed out, strikingly like human blood. It had frozen into crystals long before it fell to the Pluto ice.

A Virtual of Nilis coalesced with a snap. “Stop this.” He stood between Pirius and the Ghost. “You, Ambassador. Heal yourself.”

The gash in the Ghost’s hide closed, leaving only a pale scar. A stark slick of frozen blood showed how much it had lost in those brief moments.

Nilis turned on Pirius. He thundered, “What were you thinking, Ensign? To deal with this I have been forced to leave a meeting I crossed Sol system to attend! Is this really your highest aspiration—the highest achievement of mankind, after twenty thousand long years of interstellar conquest—to use your petty power to cause another sentient creature to destroy itself?
Why
?”

Because it’s what I’m trained to do, Pirius thought helplessly. But he flinched from Nilis’s furious glare.

“Who is it you’re angry at, Ensign?” Mara asked. “The Ghost? Or is the Ghost just a target? Perhaps you are angry at the lies that you have been told throughout your life. Now you have been brought to Sol system you see the truth, and you can’t handle your rage. But you don’t know who to blame.”

“Shut up,” Pirius said.

“Perhaps you would rather have died in combat, without having to deal with such complex truths—”

“Shut up!”

Unexpectedly the Ghost spoke. Its translated words were as toneless as ever. “I gladly obeyed the ensign’s command. I am not afraid to die.”

Nilis turned and inspected the Ghost. “Is that really true?” In an instant, Pirius saw resentfully, he had forgotten Pirius, and was taken over once more by his own endless curiosity. “But what consolation can there be for death? Tell me, Ghost—do you have gods?”

Mara warned, “All it knows of its culture is what we have taught it. As if the Ghosts studied a human religion, filtered it through their own preconceptions and gave it back to us.”

“Yes, yes,” Nilis said impatiently. “I understand that. Nevertheless—”

The Ghost said, “Not gods of the past.”

“No,” said Nilis rapidly. “Of course not. Human gods were creators. But
your
world betrayed you, didn’t it? What creator god would do that?”

“The past is a betrayal. The future is a promise.”

Mara said, “Commissary, we have tried to study Ghost philosophy. The Ghosts have a different perception of the universe than us, a different story about themselves to tell. Nobody’s really sure if concepts like religion actually map across to such alien minds.”

“Oh, of course,” Nilis said. “But I’m of the school that holds that something like religious concepts must arise in any sentient form. Perhaps all mortal creatures, humans or Ghosts, must develop a philosophy to cushion the shock of imminent personal death.”

Mara nodded. “I’d certainly concede that religious beliefs have survival value—and are likely to play an evolutionary purpose.”

“Yes, yes! Religion provides a rationale for existence in a universe which may otherwise seem chaotic—perhaps an illusory rationale, but a way to cope. And religion has a function as social cement. Cooperation is essential, and religion fuels conformity. Really, religion ought to be a universal. . . .”

As this academic talk went on, Pirius glared at the wounded Ghost, and he imagined it glared back. Pirius said, “I don’t care what it thinks about gods. I want to know what it thinks of the humans who destroyed its kind.”

Nilis and Mara tensed, but waited for the Ghost’s answer.

The Ghost said, “You are the ones who kill.”

Nilis said quickly, “Others kill too. The Xeelee kill.
You
kill.”

“Only other kinds. No Ghost would kill another Ghost; it would be a kind of suicide.”

Mara said, “The Ghosts think human war is insane—not just the war in the Galaxy, all our organized wars. Only humans spend the lives of others of our kind as if they were mere tokens. The Ghosts think nothing is so precious as sentience.”

“Humans aren’t killers,” Pirius said. He lifted his hands. “We didn’t choose this war. Before we left Earth humans didn’t wage war at all.”

Nilis actually laughed. “Ah, Ensign—another Coalition myth! Don’t pay attention to what the political officers tell you. Before spaceflight, despite the lessons of your childhood, Earth was
not
a paradise, where humans ruled other creatures in a kind of benevolent despotism; we were
not
noble savages. We have always killed, Ensign, always waged war—and as we had no alien enemy to kill in those days, we turned on each other. The proof is in the bloodstained ground of Earth.”